Adult animation about art theft

A psychiatrist named Ruben Brandt becomes a key figure in Ruben Brandt Collector, a stylish helping of adult animation from director Milorad Krstic. Presented in English, Krstic's rampantly creative Hungarian production brings its main character into contact with a group of larcenous patients who join him in a series of globe-hopping art thefts. After his father's death, Brandt begins having hallucinations in which he's threatened by the subjects of important masterworks. An example: Botticelli's renowned Birth of Venus drags him into the ocean. Krstic has said that Brandt isn’t motivated by anything as banal as financial gain; he wants to stop being haunted by works of inescapable power. Krstic employs lots of ingenuity in creating the other characters, the acrobatically agile Mimi or a two-dimensional figure whose thievery depends on his ability to slip through the space between the bottom of doorways and the floor. As the plot develops, the movie's larcenous crew plunders the Musee d'Orsay, the Louvre, MoMA and the Chicago Art Institute. Meanwhile (and there are a lot of 'meanwhiles' in Ruben Brandt Collector), a detective who collects movie memorabilia attempts to locate Brandt, who also interests mobsters who equate art with dollar signs. Making witty references to well-known paintings throughout, Krstic’s thriller eventually threatens to outsmart itself. Style, a mixture of the sensuous and surreal, goes a long way toward sustaining interest. But Ruben Brandt may be a case in which visual wit, clever distortions of reality and an abundance of creativity tend to produce an artful whirligig in which the various parts — you may want to think of them as the visual equivalent of small arias — never quite produce a whole that sings.