Among the oldest dichotomies in movies is between those motion pictures that take the world as given (cinéma vérité) and those that create their very own (animation). The boundary between these poles is not absolute. There are movies like Walerian Borowczyk’s “Goto, Isle of Love” that suggest animated cartoons made with physical sets and real actors.

Initially an animator, Borowczyk (1923-2006) left his native Poland for France in 1959 after winning an award at the Brussels Festival of Experimental Film. “Goto, Isle of Love” (1969), his first live-action feature (newly out on disc from Olive Films), was taken by some as a political allegory. Although set in an imaginary island nation suggestive of a penal colony, it is essentially a bleak, anti-authoritarian farce in the cartoonish tradition of the French avant-gardist Alfred Jarry’s provocative 1896 play “Ubu Roi.” (A true Surrealist, Borowczyk inexplicably compared it to “King Kong.”)

The bad-tempered tyrant Goto (a rumbling, hammy Pierre Brasseur, best remembered for playing the heavy in “Children of Paradise”) is cuckolded by his impassive, wistful consort (Borowczyk’s wife and frequent star, Ligia Branice) and overthrown by a clever prisoner (Guy Saint-Jean). Despite the tawdry erotic intrigue, the movie’s plot is less compelling than its strongly controlled mise-en-scène, which, with its abundance of creaky machines and fusty bric-a-brac, evokes a 19th-century cabinet of curiosities.

The critic Howard Thompson, who panned “Goto” in The New York Times when it was shown at the 1969 New York Film Festival, likened the movie’s studied drabness to that of the classic TV sitcom “The Honeymooners.” While not intended as a compliment, the analogy does speak well of Borowczyk’s Kabuki minimalism and bouts of slapstick. “Goto” was largely shot, amid the tumult of the May 1968 student uprising in Paris, in an abandoned factory once operated by Pierre and Marie Curie; static and self-contained, it’s as close to a puppet show or a graphic novel as it is to a conventional movie.