Taking ispiration from Escher's paintings, we enter the weird dimension of a school where no one has memories of the past and insane duels goes on to win the hand of a misterious girl. Is she a sexual object or the magician that grants this strange world his existence? The premises are intriguing, and the surreal style stays consistent for the entire movie, but the story does not. We are teased with a lot of plot points that don't get developed further after a buildup (the rings are the worst offenders), get introduced abruptly and then immediately forgotten (some characters just disappear too), or simply don't make any sense at all, with the promise that they'll eventually do. But they don't, leading to an ending that resolve nothing, explains nothing and even goes completely berserk, after a scene that actually could have explained everything, had the movie endend there (minor spoiler: involves an elvator filled with water). Also, the prince metaphor is presented in so many angles it loses any meaning in the end. The lesbians undertones are interesting, and the utter madness of it all is mesmerizing. Still I think it's a very beautiful piece of animation (minus the character design), with no meaning at all: deep as a pond, empty as a black hole. As an allegorical exercise, Angel's Eggs is a far more accomplished effort, in my opinion.
