If sleep is the cousin of death, let Gisaburou Sugii and Kenji Miyazawa be your hypnotists and psychopomps. Night on The Galactic Railroad, perhaps as much because of its source material as its craft, feels like something ancient and mystic. Something from an older time.

A blue cat (Giovanni), a pink cat (Campanella), birdcatchers, ticket-takers, Titanic victims, and flaming scorpions. The great path of the Milky Way and the void it lights, Giovanni's village, which looks hewn from the earth itself, groves of apples transmogrified from birds, ancient CGI cornfields, lampposts in the dark, high holy Heaven herself, a hole in the sky at the end of it all. This is the Galactic Railroad. The train that rolls in on it carries the soul of Campanella and his best friend and guide into the great beyond Giovanni, but to plot out Railroad’s literal story beats feels somewhere between pedestrian and pointless.

This is a film of dreamstuff. Characters literally phase in and out as they enter and exit the narrative, the aforementioned Titanic drownees suddenly and pointedly break the trend of all other characters being anthropomorphic cats. The train floods in a lived-in memory of the shipwreck. The birdcatcher engages in his work, seemingly is picked apart by his prey, and reappears again unharmed and unchanged. Archeologists dig into the back of a giant fossilized cow. Enormous crosses pop up twice. I could go on forever.

What does all this mean? You could lose the lifetime the film seems to signal you to cherish studying the sublime symbolwork on display here. Questions can unexpectedly jut out upon re-contemplation, like the shimmering shards of a broken iceberg. Is Giovanni’s father another victim of shipwreck? Why the Esperanto? Pardon the joke, but did Giovanni’s mother ever get her milk?

The Christian symbolism, invoked straight? Cast aside? Presented without judgment so that you may draw your own conclusions? How does the field of marching worshippers, walking along to perhaps the most stirring implementation of the Hallelujah Chorus ever put to film, strike you? Can you see yourself there, someday? (Here it is worth knowing; Miyazawa himself was a Buddhist.)

If I seem hesitant to provide answers to these questions it’s because I’m not sure there are any, not through any deficiency of the film, but as a reflection of the simple realities of its subject matter. I am struck awed by sheer all-encompassing mysticism of Railroad, a work that yawns as vast as the night sky itself.

Death comes for everybody, so perhaps it is fitting that something that deals with it should be so striking without offering any real clarity. (Not a complaint!) I have seen the film described as eerie, even unsettling, and I can understand why one might think that way, but perhaps the eeriness comes not from the railroad itself, but from the suddenness with which Campanella is taken from the world and from his friend? Lost in a river--it's always water, isn't it?

If there are answers, none are here.

I know only this: as the moon hangs over Chicago as I type this on a humid July night, the Red Line rolls by my window. Somewhere above the sky; the train of the Galactic Railroad rumbles on, to stop at a station for each and every one of us, someday, somewhere.