The City of Lost Children - 1995

What is the definition, really, of a "childhood movie"? I think you're only as old as you feel, and when I saw this movie in say, 1998, 99, 2000, whenever the shit I saw it, I was still in what I would refer to now as my "childhood". Also, I do like the website and service of Steam because holy shit, did you know there is a video game based on this movie?! WHAT?!

The City of Lost Children was directed by French auteur and weirdo Jean Pierre Jeunet. I just want to go on a tangent here and say Jeunet was another of these directors I saw when I was young that opened my eyes to foreign cinema, independent cinema, and offbeat bizarre-ness. I remember at times telling people Jeunet was my favorite director even. His filmography when I was young was this, Delicatessen, Alien Resurrection and then later Amelie. I didn't see Alien Resurrection for a long time, but I considered this and Deli and Amelie to be three of the best films I'd seen. At the time Amelie came out I was downright convinced that this guy was the next Francis Ford Coppola or something. He was unstoppable.

The City of Lost Children stars Ron Perlman as One, a circus strongman who in the beginning gets his little brother/friend kidnapped by some weirdo mutants. These mutants are mechanically altered servants of Krank, a creation himself, and eccentric searcher of dreams. He cannot experience his own dreams so he tries to watch kids dreams, except the kids are terrified of him so they keep having nightmares. Krank lives with his creations, which are four clones played by Dominique Pinon, a dwarf woman, and a brain in a aquarium that can speak. Yeah, we got a strange movie here.

The actors in this are all doing great parts. There is a large degree of committment from them, and the characters are all sympathetic. There is a unique ability to understand with each of these characters, and they have a dynamic, deep humanity to them. The style is of course the most obvious other thing to mention about this, because there is basically only a few films out there in total that look this good. Michel Gondry, Steve Jonze, Jean Pierre Jeunet, these directors are the ones in the world who have redefined exactly how good a movie can look. Everything looked fucking awesome! The movie looks so good. Highly budgeted for it's time, this was a 18,000,000 dollar budget.

I feel like this is highly regarded, well known cult movie. I wish that Jeunet had kept going after Amelie. When my ex-wife and I went to go see Micmacs in 2009, I remember us both walking out saying "meh" because it was fairly uninteresting. The style was there, but it felt like it was just going through the motions. In the end, Jeunet went into obscurity and I never saw his other film, Spivet. Fuck it, I'll rewatch Micmacs for you, my nonexistent reader. City of Lost Children is a 5.