Audio By Carbonatix

Yet another Toy Story animation — this time Toy Story 5 — continues the Pixar threat of keeping moviegoers in a state of mindless juvenile consumerism. It’s a condition that indoctrinated parents pass on to their offspring while denying their own maturity. The rote fantasy of Toy Story 5 is challenged by Lucio Castro’s live-action drama Drunken Noodles, an “adult film” almost in the old-fashioned scandalous sense of the term but, really, in the best sense: It respects the insight and emotional possibilities of real cinema.

Drunken Noodles is a time-shifting rumination on sexual desire. In a smooth-moving 82 minutes, Argentine-born Castro follows Adnan (Laith Khalifeh), an introverted immigrant New York college student and gallery intern who goes from house-sitting to thrill-chasing in the proverbial single man’s pursuit of sex and connection. Adnan’s sex life is portrayed in four segments, each titled after the needlepoint embroidery of the artist featured in the I Want Your Skull exhibit at Brooklyn’s Situations gallery.

These interlocking tales express themes depicted in the erotic artworks stitched by a mysterious hand. In the title story, Adnan breaks his loneliness through hook-ups with a bike-delivery guy; “Two Lawn Chairs” flashes back to Adnan meeting the grieving elderly needlepoint artist Sal (Ezriel Kornel) whose exhibit he hosts; “Notes for a Possible Story” flashes back further to Adnan’s dissolving affair with burly neurotic Iggie (Matthew Risch); “The Portal to Tang Dynasty’s Bishan in the Cruising Spot at McCarren Park” updates the cycle in which Adnan learns lessons from his fraught love life.

While Toy Story 5 places lighthearted emphasis on how children relate to objects (Scarlett Spears voices Bonnie, an antisocial kid obsessed with Lilypad, a computer-tablet brand), Castro contemplates adult play — the way men communicate through sexual encounters. That’s the subject of each comically graphic needlepoint tapestry that portends Adnan’s various adventures. Castro’s erotic storytelling contrasts with Pixar’s asexual Lilypad imagery shown in hand-drawn stylization. But the major difference is that Castro’s realism avoids Pixar’s trendy political message as articulated in the elitist New York Times review of Toy Story 5, which cites “how people hold onto their humanity in the age of technocapitalism, even as it reduces individuals to commercially exploitable data.”

Castro surpasses such double-talk, concentrating not on “technocapitalism” but on degrees of interpersonal exploitation between Adnan and his lovers. (If Pixar fans don’t epitomize “technocapitalism,” nothing does.) The needlepoint chapter headings give Drunken Noodles tactility. Borrowed from embroidery by New York artist Sal Salandra, each fabrication conveys the texture of human endeavor. Unlike Pixar’s digital wizards, Castro references the art history of erotic expression. Adnan’s urban and forest escapades recall Rimbaud’s 1871 poem The Drunken Boat, in which French symbolism broke from realism. When Castro goes symbolic (Sal introduces Adnan to the wonders of sensual imagination), the moment involves pantomime that evokes Nijinsky dancing to Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun.

Adnan’s combined sensual anticipation and psychological alienation lift Drunken Noodles into philosophy as the alienated protagonist contemplates Millennial society. Adnan and Iggie shout a litany of fetishes as they dive into a lake at a mountain retreat. The bike-delivery episodes extend from casual promiscuity to personal revelation when fellow immigrant Yariel (Joel Isaac) reveals his own history and ambitions, gifting Adnan with a manuscript of Drunken Noodles and Other Poems “dedicated to Jimenez Osorio.”

Drunken Noodles offers the consummation of ideas and aspirations that other art-film makers have prepared for: The mythical tales of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives), the anthropological explorations of Pierre Creton (A Prince), the surrealism of Alain Guiraudie (Staying Vertical), and the emotional epics of Julián Hernández (A Thousand Clouds of Peace, Broken Sky).

No recent animated films or heterosexual rom-coms match the complexities of desire and consciousness in Drunken Noodles. Castro’s elliptical narrative concludes with quotations from Li Bai, Chinese poet from a.d. 72. Li Bai’s lines on mortality fill Adnan’s head: “Life and Death / And once I’m drunk all heaven and earth vanish / Forgetting that the person I am really exists / Of all of our joys this must be the deepest.” Adnan confronts the circumstances of his life and dreams past them, escaping the alienation of city life and sexual neurosis — Millennial problems that the childish metaphors of Toy Story 5 can only trivialize. I can’t be the only man who dreads the prospect of another Pixar movie. The exploration of desire in Drunken Noodles defeats the infantilization of Toy Story cartoons, but moviegoers have to want it.