First of all, I developed an interpretation of this movie very early on that it held a strong theme of the "melting pot" aspect of America and American culture.
Starting with the obvious, the two main characters are an American man who is in the profession of creating movies, a visual export that can provide representations of one country to other countries, and a Romanian immigrant girl who is only about six and has clearly not been in America very long as her English is a bit off and her accent is very thick. Based on the time period, the girl seems like a representation of the wave of immigration that occurred in the early 1900s.
Alexandria's "old world" sensibilities are represented most clearly through the story Roy tells her. While he is telling the story, the visual representation of the story is shown to be a product of her mind as the characters in the story are played by people she actually knows and the setting is fluid and dreamlike with no clear location and no connection from place to place.
Like the scenery, the female character of the epic has clothes that fit in many different lands at once and are constantly changing origin. The five heroes of the story seem a bit more constricted to there lands being an African, an Indian, a Brit, an Italian, and a Spaniard (then Frenchman) but in truth, they probably aren't.
The first character Roy introduces in his epic is a slave who takes form in her mind as the kind ice delivery man who Alexandria sees every day. This assignment could have just come from the fact that he was someone she had seen recently and was fresh enough on her mind to become the first character or it could have come simply from the fact that he works providing a service which is the closest reference she had to a slave. An alternate way of dissecting it would be to note that the man is black and is represented in her mind in a traditional African fashion. While Alexandria would probably be unaware of America's history with enslaving Africans, in 1920s America black people would still be granted less rights and be treated unfairly compared to others. She could be combining the way she sees him being treated with her "old world" ideas of what a black person would traditionally dress like.
The next character is a much less ambiguous case. Roy simply calls him "The Indian" and he takes form in Alexandria's mind as an Indian man who she works with. However, as Roy is describing the Indian's back-story he uses words like "squaw" and "wigwam" which clearly show that he is referring to a Native American and not an Indian from India. While Roy is thinking of America's origins, Alexandria would probably not know much about American Indians. She sees India and she sees it by virtue of knowing an Indian immigrant.
The third character is a fantastical version of Charles Darwin but this fact is not the important detail. What is however is that he is on a quest for a rare butterfly called "Americana Exotica": Exotic America. While I probably don't need to explain the significance of this name in correlating with my topic, I would like to point out that of all the real places that make up the dream universe of Alexandria's mind, at no point is there ever an American location. They show the Statue of Liberty at one point but it is the first in France, not in Manhattan. The country of America is absent from her dream world and all the characters are actually real life Americans (whether born there or immigrant) but foreigners in her mind.
This shows strongly in the last character of Roy's epic's five man band. The character is a Spanish man represented as Roy but with the additional characteristic of a gap in his teeth like Alexandria. During the second part of his story, Alexandria asks Roy why he makes the character talk in a Spanish accent and asks that he "talk normal. Like you." Normal by Alexandria's definition is an American accent, a standard accent in a land mainly consisting of people from places with very different accents. The character's ethnicity is also fluid as Roy changes him to a French man at one point to ret-con a plot error even though he sticks with the American accent. It doesn't matter where you come from, you can be American, perhaps?
Although I mainly wanted to talk about this theme, I wanted to say a few things on the actual plot of the epic. A lot of people complained about the simple story but the epic itself is realistic as a story a man might make up to tell a little girl. While the story is, for Alexandria, a bunch of people she knows on an adventure, for Roy it is a healing process with the bad guy played by the man who he blames for ruining his life and limbs. The bad guy is the same in Roy's mind as Alexandria's as she encountered him at the hospital and knew him to be the man who Roy hated. The bad guy is also the only character based on a person who wears the same clothes he did in reality: an expensive white suit of no origin. He is where fantasy and reality meet.
This movie is apparently based off a Bulgarian film called "Yo Ho Ho" that seems to have the same themes in terms of friendship and reclaiming your life after depression, as shown through Roy and Alexandria's relationship. I have not seen it so I cannot account for whether anything else could be taken from it but I can't help but think that if there's anything that would separate these two movies, what I'm trying to prove here is it.
I very well could be reading too much into this but isn't it better that I got more out of it than less? Also, I just noticed: the director is Indian but went to college and now works in America.
Maybe it isn't so ridiculous.
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