The Cathedral of New Emotions (Blu-ray)(2006)

On a shortlist with BELLADONNA OF SADNESS and FANTASTIC PLANET as one of the most surreal, psychedelic and truly cosmic animated features ever made, German director Helmut Herbst's THE CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS follows a commune of Berlin stoners and intellectuals who get set adrift in space in 1972 in a packing container clutched in a giant flying hand. Various space flotsam smashes into the windshield - enormous insects, Mighty Mouse, a Bird Man from "Flash Gordon" - while hypnotic Krautrock drones in the background moaning "Where am I?", and a naked man bounces up and down off a massive red pepper. So begins our descent down the psychotic rabbit hole of CATHEDRAL, a true hallucinogenic Space Freakout if there ever was one: imagine Ralph Bakshi animating an R-rated version of John Carpenter's DARK STAR, or the cartoon equivalent of Can's "Ege Bamyasi." The crew spend their days staring into the pulsating light of the fusion reactor wondering about the outcome of the Vietnam War, or bemoaning their sexual inertia. Their descent into moral and political lethargy is interrupted by the arrival of a very attractive young man, Mulligan, who's discovered in their monthly supply shipment from the discount store. Eventually this screwy crew of seriously baked stoners find themselves searching for the enigmatic Matthew Madson, a Yeti-like wild man who may be the mysterious astronaut who first convinced them to embark on their deranged odyssey. Visually the film is like no other, filled with characters morphing into gray fleshy blobs every time they pass a Black Hole, constantly disrobing and attempting to seduce each other (and despite the random nudity, the crewmembers are weirdly androgynous as if genders are meaningless.) One of the rarest tiles in world animation and never before officially released on physical media, CATHEDRAL has been newly restored from the original camera negative and sound elements by Deaf Crocodile. In German with English subtitles.