Nominated for best International Film at this year’s Oscars, EO is a quirky docudrama about a donkey.

It was always going to be a hard act to stop All Quiet on The Western Front from picking up the International Oscar, but, by golly, EO was a legitimate contender with its pathos, charm and pluckiness.

Director Jerzy Skolimowski and his co-writer, spouse Ewa Piaskowska, basically steal Robert Bresson’s classic film, Au Hasard Balthazar, and infuses it with his own maverick style, proving that the source material is solid and can sustain variations on its theme, like a good song can play in styles as diverse as jazz and reggae.

The title cheekily refers to the onomatopoeic sound the donkey makes and gives the viewer an inkling of the twinkle of the tale.

The endearing equine is introduced as part of a travelling circus where he plays second hoof to a young woman who treats him with tenderness. But strident animal rights activists instigate his retirement and from there he journeys through a string of placements including being a mascot for a village soccer team.

Skolimowski employs a subjective donkey eyed lense to give an ass view of humans, a sight not terribly flattering to the big brained biped.

The carrot garlanded creature’s odyssey is depicted as a daisy chain of events and episodes, eccentric and absurd, political and social, comic and tragic.

Eo meets smugglers, defrocked priests, soldiers, football hooligans and a decadent bourgeois diva, a crème cameo by Isabelle Huppert as he ventures full circle in an existential excursion which ponders the mulish macho posturing of male human beings and the often asinine behaviour of the entire human race.

Fable, allegory, whatever you make of it, EO is certainly an endearing entertainment to burro into.