Reviewed by: Dare Devil Kid (DDK)
Rating: 1.9/5 stars
The arrival of a new animated feature from American distributor GKids is usually a good sign. The company has given us international treasures and erstwhile Oscar nominees such as "The Secret of Kells", "Ernest and Celestine", "Chico and Rita" and "A Cat in Paris", which probably would have languished in obscurity were it not were their initiative to ensure that these masterpieces reach a wider American audience.
Its latest release is the Oscar-nominated Brazilian film "Boy & the World", and while the movie is definitely an example of the adventurous, idiosyncratic, art-house animated style the company has come to represent over the years, it comes nowhere close to achieving the heights of the aforementioned titles. Without using any intelligible or even decipherable dialogue (which would have been fine had the narrative not being so tedious and soporific; this is certainly no "Shaun the Sheep"), the animated offering lackadaisically tells the story of a young boy living in an impoverished countryside whose father moves to the city in search of work. Later, the boy follows him, and has a series of encounters that expose him to the woes of the modern world: urbanization, economic exploitation, environmental degradation, and so on. However, the narrative never attempts to offer alternative to what it alludes to being evils that urgently need to be eradicated from our lifestyles.
Director Alê Abreu uses a unique visual style that combines childlike, almost stick-figure people with an increasingly frenzied decoupage to represent the overstimulated world he's swallowed up in. It's rather like a very talented grade-schooler's refrigerator- door drawings expressing life. Unfortunately, the simplistic moral message of the movie and its insistence on remaining nonverbal make "Boy & the World" feel like something that would have been more tolerable as a 15- minute short than an 80-minute feature, which makes us wonder why on earth did this travesty bag an Oscar nomination over other much more deserving animated features this year. Was it just because of the distributor's reputation...?
Rating: 1.9/5 stars
The arrival of a new animated feature from American distributor GKids is usually a good sign. The company has given us international treasures and erstwhile Oscar nominees such as "The Secret of Kells", "Ernest and Celestine", "Chico and Rita" and "A Cat in Paris", which probably would have languished in obscurity were it not were their initiative to ensure that these masterpieces reach a wider American audience.
Its latest release is the Oscar-nominated Brazilian film "Boy & the World", and while the movie is definitely an example of the adventurous, idiosyncratic, art-house animated style the company has come to represent over the years, it comes nowhere close to achieving the heights of the aforementioned titles. Without using any intelligible or even decipherable dialogue (which would have been fine had the narrative not being so tedious and soporific; this is certainly no "Shaun the Sheep"), the animated offering lackadaisically tells the story of a young boy living in an impoverished countryside whose father moves to the city in search of work. Later, the boy follows him, and has a series of encounters that expose him to the woes of the modern world: urbanization, economic exploitation, environmental degradation, and so on. However, the narrative never attempts to offer alternative to what it alludes to being evils that urgently need to be eradicated from our lifestyles.
Director Alê Abreu uses a unique visual style that combines childlike, almost stick-figure people with an increasingly frenzied decoupage to represent the overstimulated world he's swallowed up in. It's rather like a very talented grade-schooler's refrigerator- door drawings expressing life. Unfortunately, the simplistic moral message of the movie and its insistence on remaining nonverbal make "Boy & the World" feel like something that would have been more tolerable as a 15- minute short than an 80-minute feature, which makes us wonder why on earth did this travesty bag an Oscar nomination over other much more deserving animated features this year. Was it just because of the distributor's reputation...?