My first impression is I really wish I had had this blu ray back in college when I would hang out with my favorite film school friend who was into super surrealist/abstract art (and his cool roommates) for many stoned hours with watch like Hawking and David Gilmour present: Fractals and the 2001 Jupiter sequence synced to Echoes. Clearly, Marcel Jankovics and his crew pool through fluid, Slippery, angular and playfully metaphorical animation (notice the Dragon looks more like a city or many steel buildings in one) a monumental synthesis of myths we may not be familiar with but absolutely are familiar with is a peak of those kinds of times.
Second impression: Jankovics isn't creating a terribly complex story, and I get if that doesn't draw some into this, but to put it bluntly I don't mind. I don't need this to give me the Feels ala Pixar, I wanted something going in that could challenge how the medium of animation could be challenged and transformed and even transcended, and he and his crew did that and then some. I'm not even sure how many in the world of more modern animation have seen it, but it's hard not to see its influence on like 85% of Adult Swim and even some Anime. But it doesn't need to be remarked upon as influential to be something so compelling; it's through how it makes Myths feel vital that counts, how Shapes and color and the movement of forms is one thing, and finding new ways to create and make new forms is another.
It reminds me of how when one learns about old myths in school, even back to foundational ones like Gilgamesh, that it can sometimes take a little time (maybe too much depending on the teacher) to get into what makes them work. Jankovics doesn't have that problem because he has the propulsion of immersing us in the experience of... wherever this is supposed to be in these kingdoms and forests and what seems like a far out cosmos, places where a Gnome with a Beard can be congruous with a woman who has many tears to shed because of all the time with that seven headed dragon.
It's trippy, maybe the trippiest/trance-inducing movie ever made (a friend I watched it with remarked that this could very well be what we could've gotten with Jodorowsky's Dune), but it doesn't lose sight, at least to me, of the heroes journey and making it a feast for the senses. If they had only managed to snag a Prog-Rock group to do the soundtrack, I guarantee it would have been a Midnight Movie with success on par with the rest of them.
