Christoph Lauenstein

The newbie director's aesthetic influences are top of the line: The Quay brothers' nightmarish visions of distressed puppets adrift in decayed landscapes; Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein's Oscar-winning 1989 short Balance; Sylvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville; Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children; Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer's psychologically perverse fairy tales -- we're talking the greatest hits of gloomy, doomy European animation and hyper-stylized live action.