Dust Bunny does not ease you into its world, and so without having any idea what I was getting into, it took me a good 20 minutes to get on its wavelength. In that early section, we see a young girl complain to her parents about a monster under her bed, a wish upon a star that apparently brings about a bizarrely stylishly dressed Mads Mikkelsen and his extraordinary fighting abilities, and the loss of the aforementioned parents to the huge mouth of the supposed monster, all with hardly any dialogue. The girl decides to hire Mikkelsen to rid her of the beast, and we continue off into this fantastical world of bright colors, moral darkness, and enormous, sharp teeth.
This is the feature debut for director Bryan Fuller, who’s responsible for the TV series Pushing Daisies, which helps explain this movie’s arch-precious aesthetic, and also for the TV series Hannibal, which helps explain the presence of Mads Mikkelsen and the sometimes surprising amount of violence we see here. And I won’t describe the plot much more, partly because I found myself having no idea where everything was headed, and partly because it doesn’t always make the most sense anyway, although Fuller set himself up well by creating a world that doesn’t really need to make complete sense. It’s not always clear to us who the movie is made for, with some sections being far too adult for children, and much of the fairy-tale feel seeming geared toward those same children. But this is probably all by design, with the real answer being that it’s made for sophisticated 12-year-olds with a sense of real wonder, and their parents who never entirely got old and stuffy.
The movie is often wonderful to look at, especially when it’s not stealing outright from the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, whose style in films like Delicatessen and City of Lost Children is unmistakable and also should be left wholly to them. But it’s also true that computers are doing a whole lot of heavy visual lifting here, and that does hold the movie back from having more life and excitement than it might have with a more tactile vision. And if ever there were a film that cried out to the heavens for practical effects instead of computer-generated images, it’s this one, but, alas, we have no such luck. Still, Dust Bunny is strange and exciting and will delight plenty of people, young and old, who have just the right sensibility.
Dust Bunny is in theaters.
