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White cherry blossoms descend from the sky just as a tragedy is about to change the course of a uniquely religious fishing community on the shores of Lake Peipsi, the body of water that separates Estonia from Russia. Relatively commonplace as that description may read, writer-director Marko Raat’s “8 Views of Lake Biwa” is closer to a dreamlike folktale — set sometime during the 20th century — than to pastoral realism.

For starters, Raat took the title, along with the names for each segment the narrative is divided into, from a series of centuries-old Japanese paintings (in turn inspired by ancient Chinese art) depicting scenic views from distinct points along the eponymous Lake Biwa, near the city of Kyoto. And while the geographic location in the film is nowhere near that Asian nation, in this imagined reality, Raat’s characters can seemingly travel to Japan by boat without much trouble, as if...

This animated combination of cynicism and grotesquerie has as much energy as Aardman and double the Wtf quotient

The only fitting comparison for this deranged Estonian stop-motion animation is if Shaun the Sheep had somehow been infected with a terminal case of Bse. The human characters are ugly lumpen golems, all the better to suggest rural backwardness; milk enjoys the same almost-ontological status here as Malkovichness in Being John Malkovich; the film has an unhealthy anal fixation that at one point expresses itself in a giant bear, irritated by a heavy-metal guitarist in his colon, who farts out an entire forestful of animals. In short, it’s brilliant.

City brats Priidik (voiced by co-director Mikk Mägi), Aino (co-director Oskar Lehemaa) and Mart (Mägi) are sent to stay with their grandfather (Mägi), who to their scorn is always doing “barn things”. The old fella prides himself on his way with an...