The film deals loosely with the adventures of the grizzled Gustav who captains a ship â a giant floating âsnailboatâ â with a crew of talking animals and lumbering sailors in blackface. It unspools like a perverse childrenâs story book, all at once cuddly cute, grotesquely obscene and beyond absurd as normal narrative logic shatters, giving way to an episodic, free-associative structure that one critic likened to âcinematic memory association.â (joergbuttgereit.com)