FAUST (Directed by Jan Svankmajer.)

If The Lion King is fast food animation, Faust is an excessive gourmet meal, with course piled upon course until you’ll probably start to feel dizzy and want to excuse yourself from the table. The Czech master-animator combines live action, clay-mation, puppet theatre and every other special effect in his own particular cannon for an inventive retelling of the Faustian myth, mixing Goethe, Marlowe, Gounod and every other source he can find into one big melting pot of the soul. While he doesn’t quite make a Macphisto of it, the results can be as baffling as they are dazzling, and only his sheer visual imagination sustains a feature that, dramatically at least, too frequently falls flat. But his black, even bleak humour and eye for surreal detail ensures Faust is a treat for his fans, a mind boggling odyssey into Svankmajer’s nightmarish parallel universe.