The film deals loosely with the adventures of the grizzled Gustav who captains a ship a giant floating snailboat with a crew of talking animals and lumbering sailors in blackface It unspools like a perverse childrens story book all at once cuddly cute grotesquely obscene and beyond absurd as normal narrative logic shatters giving way to an episodic freeassociative structure that one critic likened to cinematic memory association joergbuttgereitcom