This movie captures the surreal feeling of dreaming more than anything I can think of.

The movie is about a teenage girl who wants to run away and not join the circus. When her mother has to go to the hospital, that night she goes to sleep and has a really strange dream about it. Then really weird things start happening in front of a "green screen". It was very challenging for me to accept the artificial scenes that begin to occur out of nowhere, but the nonchalance of everyone involved is itself the sort of thing that would happen in a dream. After a little while, it's very obvious that the whole movie is just the girl's dream, and a lot of clichés are delivered, but by the time you get to the end, the clichés almost manage to add up to something greater. It helps that the characters are likeable, and that many of the visuals thrust upon you spontaneously are remarkable. There are a lot of computer generated effects that seem to be straight out of the "virtual reality" era of 1993 or so, which made it hard for me to detect the actual year this movie was made. But the primitive nature of these effects really helps to convey the sense of dreaming: When a real person's face is pasted right onto a clearly non-living, crudely-animated object, it innately instills the creepy, foreboding feeling that the non-living thing is going to act unpredictably at any moment. And even though most of this movie was made with a "green screen", the "imperfect" compositing helps to create a sense of distorted time and scale... once more, just like in a dream! Some very artful transitions between scenes imply that no lack of skill caused the peculiarity of these effects.

Something about this movie reminds me of Dark City, especially considering both movies didn't quite live up to their full potentials. But Dark City is more of a mystery to be solved, whereas this movie offers less plot but a much stronger "dreamlike" feeling.

So without lingering on any weak points, let's just say I'm impressed by this particular achievement.