Due to some disturbances in our usual schedule, I had to skip a day of posting recently. I thought we’d get back into the groove with an easy to watch film. This is a Brazilian animated film that’s only about 80 minutes long. It turned out to be fairly heavy and depressing watch with no dialogue at all. The film does list voice actors but the only sounds they make are indecipherable mumbles and exclamations.

The protagonist is a young boy who lives in a rural village. His days are filled with joy and we share in his delight as he sees the world through curious and innocent eyes. But then one day his father leaves, presumably in order to work, and the boy misses him terribly. He decides to go off in search for his father and his quest is epitomized by constantly listening for the faintest refrains of a tune his father used to play for him on his flute. His first stop has him befriending an old man who despite his advanced age must toil at collecting cotton to earn a living. Still in search of the song, he wanders to a factory where the cotton is turned into rolls of cloth. He follows one of the factory workers home to the city where he hears an entirely different song: one of strictly regimented order and perceives it as being in direct opposition to his own song of joy and spontaneity.

The art style is reminiscent of a child’s crayons and perfectly captures the child’s point of view. The opening scene which starts with simple drawings and steadily becomes more complex as the world becomes larger and larger for the child is a fantastic example of the impressive degree of creativity that went into this film. Whether it’s the design of the cities, the trains, the tanks, the marching bands or quilts, the aesthetic choices are endlessly diverting and novel. The soundscape is great as well with the music being an integral part of the story. This is one excellently crafted animated film in all respects and should be required watching for this alone.

What’s especially surprising is how serious and even dark the story is. As you might expect from the rest of my blog, I’m not a big fan of works of art that criticize capitalism and the criticism in Boy and the World is no more well reasoned that other run of the mill leftist creeds. This doesn’t prevent me from acknowledging how well executed it is here. Its shows how dehumanizing it is to value people solely by their economic output and how slotting people as if they were cogs in a vast machine utterly destroys their individuality. There are at least a couple of moments in this film which are completely devastating to me in terms of emotional impact. I don’t want to spoil things too much but I really like the interpretation that the characters the boy meets can be seen as future versions of himself. Usually when English language animated films try to cater to an adult audience they still can’t leave behind the assumption that the primary audience is still children. This film doesn’t have this problem at all and is definitely one of the darkest films I’ve watched recently, animated or not.

All in all, this is a great work of art and, as my wife states, a powerful demonstration of an effect that only animated films can achieve. Highly recommended.