Here is a weird, very bemusing and sometimes wonderful anime from Japan: a kind of miniaturist epic or odyssey from animator and director Masaaki Yuasa, adapted from a campus novel by Tomihiko Morimi – and evidently an extension or development of ideas from his earlier book The Tatami Galaxy. It is romantic and hallucinogenic, with an edge of softcore erotic sleaze.

A female student with dark hair (voiced by Kana Hanazawa) goes down the rabbit hole for an all-night dreamlike adventure of drinking and partying. She is on a quest to discover a children’s book she once loved. She is also being pursued by an older student, Senpai (Gen Hoshino), who is in love with her, or at any rate sexually obsessed with her, and not only discovers the book but discovers her own childhood copy. He then occupies strange, kaleidoscope fantasies about how he might make her his own.

It feels like Lewis Carroll or the Nighttown episode of Ulysses, and there is an interesting passage about what Yukio Mishima owes to Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas. A diverting hothouse flower of a film.