German silent film
- Crosses the Line Twice: Much of the movie's comedy. A boy shooting his father figure? Not very funny. A boy shooting the handful of balloons his father figure is using to fly, only for him to be completely uninjured by the landing? Hilari(o)us.
- Fridge Horror: Ossi stuffing herself with food and drinking directly from a flower vase is funny... until you realize that she's only doing it because Lancelot thinks that she doesn't need food or water. As do the monks, and they were planning to lock up their "doll" in a storage room after the wedding. They almost made an innocent woman starve to death without even realizing it!
- Fridge Logic: So, how does Ossi know which buttons on her back are being pressed at the moment, exactly?
- Older Than They Think: What do you mean there was a German Silent Film about a young woman and her robotic Doppelgänger before Metropolis?
- Narm: The Doll's Perpetual Smiler look (which Ossi later has to imitate) seems like it was intended to be cute In-Universe, but it mostly just makes her look like a Stepford Smiler, or possibly a stoner. Though given the overall tone of the film, this might have been intentional.
- Protagonist Title Fallacy: Much like with Coppélia, the eponymous doll has fairly little screentime. However, Ossi spends the bulk of the movie impersonating it.
- Stylistic Suck: The sets do not look real at all, but this was most likely deliberately to give the film more of a storybook feel.
- Values Dissonance: While it's treated as Black Comedy, the story never really criticizes Hilarius for beating his apprentice. At the time, such punishments were seen as the mark of a Stern Teacher, but not necessarily considered amoral, explaining why he's Easily Forgiven for them. By today's standards however, he comes of as an outright child abuser, making him a bit of a Karma Houdini.
- Visual Effects of Awesome: For a movie consisting mostly of deliberate, stylised Special Effects Failure, the Double Vision trick used to put two Ossis on screen has aged very well over the last century, and still looks quite good today. The same could be said about the "ghost" effect used when she appears in Lancelot's dream.
Polish novel
- Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Izabela: Rich Bitch or a victim of impractical, spoiling upbringing? (Note: "educate your daughters properly, or they'll end up on the street when their husbands die" is a message in some positivist Polish literature, especially by Prus.)
- Wokulski: idealist or maybe not?
- Misaimed Fandom: Wokulski's status as Dogged Nice Guy is memetic in Polish culture, to the point a lot of people take it at a face value that he simply "deserves" Izabela for all the moves he makes around her. This entirely misses the point that she's a human being with her own feelings (even if selfish) and just because a rich, nice suitor shows up doesn't mean she should throw herself on him instantly. Or how she can be legitimately creeped out by a guy twice her age trying to court her in an extremely non-subtle fashion.
- Then again, she repeatedly toys with him and it never occurs to her to simply tell the guy she's not interested, even though she can't stand him.
