It is a perceptive and delicately written study of human relations and motivations, painful, funny and fresh, which Cobbold has structured quite ingeniously, building the story layer upon layer, rather like a painting.
However, beginning with Zendikar the world-centric storytelling was complemented by an overlying story layer.
Exquisitely detailed animation style supports a story layered with irony and dark comedy, from lowbrow jokes about bodily functions to multiple reversals in what the audience knows about both our hero and the treasure he seeks.
Yet it has a firm grip on the past: it sees that Christianity is a religion of stories, layer on layer, right back to Christ's apostles.
Different stories layer up, interweave: The war in Europe finds an echo in Mr. Spiegelman's adult conflicts with his father, Vladek.
I started off intending it to be mostly a satire of apocalypse narratives and how seriously we take them, and only as the story progressed, layer upon layer, did I begin to realize that I was taking this particular narrative seriously, too.
Yet this formidable unit contain human stories layered with poignance, resilience and cheeky wit.
There are five stories, layered and stuck together, raising the possibility that Garrone modelled the whole thing on a lasagna verde.
The first is a simple 1950s block, its three stories layered with lines of box windows, where new arrivals are first given somewhere to live.
I'd trained myself to write through back stories, layers of details and thickets of connections, but the more I pared my prose to reach 100 words, a different kind of storytelling presented itself.
His production, which last month concluded a sold-out tour of Turin, Naples and Milan, featured minstrels, two overlapping stories, layers of language (English, Italian, Western Lombardian, Sicilian, Neapolitan, Piedmontese, Abruzzese) and characters blissfully free of self-consciousness.
