If you asked someone to come up with an animated fiction folly that incorporated elements of psychology, film history and half the artists indexed in H.W. Janson’s monumental reference tome, History of Art, chances are it would look something like Ruben Brandt, Collector (Ruben Brandt, a gyujto). This ingeniously imagined feature debut from Slovenian-born artist Milorad Krstic, produced in Hungary, tells the story of a disturbed shrink who has four of his patients steal priceless works of Western art — including canvases by Botticelli, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Hopper, Picasso and Warhol — in the hope that the characters from the paintings stop haunting his nightmares. Jumping from sophisticated art-history references to blockbuster action scenes a la Mission: Impossible while splicing in a reference or two to Spielberg and Hitchcock in between, this highbrow-lowbrow hybrid should interest boutique outlets that have experience distributing animated fare aimed at grownups. 

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Ruben Brandt (voiced by Ivan Kamaras) is a renowned psychotherapist who suffers from bizarre nightmares in which he goes up against characters from world-famous paintings. The Infanta Margarita Teresa of Spain, for example, famously portrayed numerous times by Diego Velazquez, violently attacks Brandt on a train in the film’s arresting first scene. 

Like the rest of the feature, the opening sequence combines different drawing techniques to create a visually cacophonous collage effect, with the rails in the foreground drawn in comic book-style ligne claire, the stormy sky in oil colors worthy of Turner and the train, once it comes into view, and its entire route clearly mapped out with the aid of computer-based programming and CGI. (Krstic is credited with the overall design, while he shares animation-director credits with Marcell Laszlo.)

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“Art is the key to the troubles of the mind,” according to Dr. Brandt — whose name recalls Netherlandish maestros Rubens and Rembrandt — so to try and rid him of his terrifying visions, a small group of his most colorful patients, led by acrobatic kleptomaniac Mimi (Gabriella Hamori), steal the works in question. Owning the paintings, the hope seems to be, will finally give Brandt some rest. This sends the thieving foursome on a trip around the world, where they steal from institutions such as the Louvre, the Tate, the Uffizi, MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. 

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Since the general public is not aware of the identity of the criminals, they become collectively known as “the collector.” As private investigator Kowalski (Csaba “Kor” Marton) explains, the paintings are too famous to be resold on the black market, so it is likely a collector who is behind their disappearance. Krstic, who wrote the screenplay with Radmila Roczkov (also a producer), keeps things compact even as the script digs into the past of both Kowalski and Brandt and U.S. government agencies, East-Germany, psychological experiments and cinema slowly become a connected whole. +

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Ruben Brandt’s pacing is amazingly fast for a film filled to the brim with art-history references and ideas borrowed from modern psychology and lovers of either field will have a, well, field day spotting the countless visual and verbal references. The beauty of the screenplay, however, is that audiences with next to no knowledge of either discipline won’t feel either excluded or overwhelmed as they’ll be too busy enjoying the heist part and figuring out the stories of Brandt and Kowalski. There is an early sequence that sets the tone as Mimi is followed through Paris after having stolen an artifact from a Cleopatra exhibition for six breathless minutes, with Krstic and his animators clearly enjoying the added liberty that animation gives him to choreograph the elaborate chase sequence. While clearly enamored of the many classical, painted works featured here, Ruben Brandt isn’t below making fun of more modern types of genres, such as performance art, used in a Tokyo-set sequence that’s funny and clever.