A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan over thirty years later, where he once again must confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life.

Cookie is a teen runaway who escapes her abusive stepfather and heads for the Big Apple with her younger brother. When she arrives at the Port Authority bus terminal, Cookie meets a charming but sadistic pimp named Duke. With nowhere to go, Cookie is soon working for Duke, who introduces her to the harsh, brutal life of being a prostitute.

Dorothy is carried back to Oz by a green turkey balloon on the final Thanksgiving she is to spend with her aunt and uncle, who are moving to a retirement community. She meets Jack Pumpkinhead, The Hungry Tiger, and Tic Toc (sic), and must stop the evil Tyrone the Terrible Toy Tinkerer (looking suspiciously like John R. Neil's depiction of the Nome King), who brings the balloon to life.

The Gang participates in the annual scavenger hunt to win their own ice cream flavor but the stakes are made even higher when Bingo makes a bet with Catchum that if he wins, he and Leland get the Gang's clubhouse.

The Polish city of Łódź was under Nazi occupation for nearly the entirety of WWII. The segregation of the Jewish population into the ghetto, and the subsequent horrors are vividly chronicled via newsreels and photographs. The narration is taken almost entirely from journals and diaries of those who lived–and died–through the course of the occupation, with the number of different narrators diminishing as the film progresses, symbolic of the death of each narrator.