In this blog post, we’ll examine how ‘The City of Lost Children’ uses the structure of a classic fairy tale to create surreal characters, spaces, images, and desires, as well as its unique visual aesthetics and style of expression.
A Fairy Tale for Adults
The term “fairy tale” refers to stories based on the childlike innocence of children—stories where the villain is inevitably punished and justice always prevails. In terms of this basic structure, this film is not significantly different from a typical fairy tale. There is a massive castle inhabited by a band of villains; in a world filled with darkness, people groan and live in misery; and our protagonist—who represents the world’s sole hope for salvation—navigates through hardship and adversity. This structure is so traditional that it seems almost perfect. The film borrows this structure, which has lived in our unconscious for so long, to tell a story created by adults, for adults.
What makes this film unique?
The director of this film is Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who gained worldwide attention with his feature film ‘Delicatessen’. In his previous work as well, he built his own unique world through a film in which nothing—from the distinctive historical setting to the unique characters, spaces, and visuals—was ordinary. I can’t help but wonder if this film represents the pinnacle of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s experiments with visuals, spaces, settings, and characters.
With its unprecedented temporal and spatial settings alone, this film already transcends the reality around us, masterfully depicting an imaginary world that might just exist somewhere we don’t know about. Although its foundation is built entirely on fairy-tale-like imagination, the backdrop unfolds as a world painted in the murky, decadent hues of adult desire and greed—as if we were witnessing a fairy-tale world created by a young demon.
Within this world, there are images born from a truly fantastical premise: the failed creations of a scientist who brings life into the world kidnap children to steal their dreams. At the same time, it is a unique space born from the ambiguity of these images, which bear a striking resemblance to the adult world we inhabit.
Film and Surrealist Style and Expression
In fact, this film should be viewed as closer to a science fiction or cult film than a surrealist film. However, the film’s characters are closer to the surreal than to reality, and the story itself captures human desires through dreams and the unconscious—elements that are at the very essence of surrealism.
While previous surrealist films have conveyed surrealist expressions and explored their themes through everyday characters, settings, and narratives, this film is the exact opposite. It is a film in which surreal characters, set against surreal backdrops, tell a surreal story that touches upon both everyday life and our most primal childlike innocence.
The film begins in the all-too-typical Christmas Eve bedroom of a young child. As the child waits for Santa with sparkling eyes, Santa appears, rappelling down the chimney on a rope. With a gentle smile, this Santa gives the child a toy. However, moments later, another Santa appears, and the film’s imagery suddenly begins to distort. Santas continue to appear in the child’s room—one, two, three, four. They keep arriving, each with a gentle smile.
The child’s room soon becomes completely filled with Santas. Santa is no longer an object of admiration and love for the child. They occupy the child’s room and even start drinking alcohol. The visuals become severely distorted, as if hinting that something is terribly wrong, and the child wails in the face of this absurd situation.
Then the screen cuts to a scene showing an elderly man wailing. This is the nightmare of a child who was created as a perfect child prodigy by a scientist specializing in life creation but who, having lost his dreams from birth, grew old far too early—a child who, in an attempt to regain his youth, kidnaps other children and steals their dreams. Because all the children he kidnapped hated and feared him, the dreams he stole always turned into nightmares, leading him to fail time and time again.
The film uses the image of Santa Claus at Christmas—which symbolizes children’s purest innocence—to create the imagery of a horrific nightmare. From the moment the second Santa appears, the screen begins to distort severely, and the music shifts from the peaceful, beautiful melodies of the opening to eerie, dissonant tones. However, this horrific nightmare was actually the object of a distorted desire—one that someone had sought to seize for their own ends.
The one who failed wails frantically in agony, while the child whose dream was actually stolen remains utterly serene. A creature that was meant to be the most perfect creation but ended up the most immature. I can’t help but wonder if this is a surrealist portrayal of the very hollow desires and material cravings that our era has long dreamed of.
This film features an unusually large number of scenes depicting the “butterfly effect.” The most iconic of these is when the protagonist, under hypnosis, tries to strangle the heroine to death, and a teardrop she sheds flies and lands on a spiderweb; that slight tremor wakes a sleeping bird; the bird’s chirping wakes a sleeping dog; the dog’s barking irritates a drunkard, causing him to throw a bottle; as the bottle shatters, a bird takes flight and its droppings land on a car’s windshield, causing an accident; that accident causes the sewers to overflow, leading to a commotion as the prostitutes in a brothel evacuate; distracted by this, a utility pole repairman accidentally causes a citywide blackout, extinguishing the lighthouse; and because the lighthouse is out, a massive ship crashes into the pier where the protagonist is standing, causing the hypnotized protagonist to snap out of his trance—that is the kind of scene.
Such scenes are repeatedly applied and used throughout the film, demonstrating that massive consequences often arise from small coincidences rather than meaningless, luck-like coincidences. I can’t help but wonder if this was an attempt to convey—using surrealist expression—that even the trivialities of our daily lives serve as the prelude and foundation for future, monumental events.
A Fairy-Tale Ending and Surrealist Visual Aesthetics
And at the very end of the film, there is the sequence where the protagonist enters the dream of the creature that steals dreams to rescue the child. The nightmare involving Santa at the beginning of the film. Just as the protagonist appears in Santa’s place, picks up the child, and is about to leave the child’s room, the door transforms into a massive black iron gate, and the child’s face becomes that of the creature that steals dreams, asking the protagonist why he is trying to interfere.
In response, the protagonist offers to let the creature take his own dreams instead of the child’s, and the creature agrees. The creature gradually regains its youth by stealing the protagonist’s dreams. Conversely, the protagonist grows older and older. However, after becoming excessively young—to the point of turning into a baby—the creature finds itself unable to leave the dream. The protagonist, the child whose dreams are being stolen, and the creature, now a baby, all leave the dream together at a leisurely pace.
Everything ends in failure, and the story concludes when a scientist—who had been hiding beneath the sea, creating life—appears at the very end and destroys the massive mechanical entity.
The film concludes with a classic fairy-tale ending. Like Dorothy and her companions leaving the Wizard’s castle behind, they exchange happy smiles, as if realizing they have reclaimed something precious that had always been by their side.
The narrative and structure are so overly by-the-book that one cannot specifically point to anything as being “surrealist.” However, I believe this film best embodies the most surrealist qualities in terms of its visual aesthetics. With its dreamlike and unimaginably surreal visual aesthetics that persist until the very end, the film is more than enough to awaken the twisted fairy-tale imagination and surrealistic imagination slumbering in the audience’s visual subconscious.
If surrealism found a point where the destruction and creation of form can coexist by freeing humans from the shackles of reason, I can’t help but wonder if this film expresses that very idea through the destruction of boundaries—achieved via machines that traverse the line between dream and reality, as seen later in ‘The Matrix’—and through a character driven by the ambiguous desire to possess the dreams of others, despite being a creature incapable of dreaming.
Through this, the audience encounters a new cinematic space and characters unlike anything they have seen before. A pure fairy tale tainted by the desires of adults, presented through a thoroughly surrealist medium—I believe this is the most unique and surrealistic style of expression that this film alone possesses.
