Review of Ruben Brandt, Collector (2018)
Seen in 2020.
A mad scientist inserts subliminal pictures of 13 famous paintings into cartoons, once per second, to program his son into being a great artist. Instead, the son is haunted by nightmares and steals the paintings.
The plot sucks. The characters are weak, the Lupin-style fantasy heists are dull and Britney Spears is covered on the soundtrack. It is the art style that saves this film. I don’t particularly enjoy casual cubism, but the fluidity and above all the consistency of that art is very impressive, more so than the individual designs. A few scenes, including the very last, are beautiful. The dense intertext is OK too, and the cosmopolitanism reminds me of Porco Rosso (1992).