E-Mail This Article to a Friend TREE OF PALME

Have you ever watched a film and — despite identifiable characters and comprehensible dialogue — had no idea what was going on? That was my experience of Takashi Nakamura’s labyrinthine anime allegory. Spinning off from a retelling of Pinocchio, the narrative fidgets between places and times, hatching bizarre hodge-podge ecologies from fantastical creatures and alien landscapes. My impression was that Nakamura is deliberating on the underpinnings of communication, but because of a baroque logic that eschews cause and effect, it’s a chore to understand what he’s getting at. Unlike Western cartoons, which have traditionally sought to simplify abstruse themes into digestible didactic symbols, this Japanese fantasy presents a world far scarier and more complex than ours. Although laudable for its formal ambition, Tree of Palme demands too much patience of anyone not fully initiated into the anime/manga tradition. In Japanese with English subtitles. (130 minutes)