Eyes have been crucial to the last several animated features I've seen. The eyes, and the action going on with the skin (or wool) around the eyes, clearly communicate exactly what the character is feeling, no matter how complex. In the case of Boy & The World, a 2013 Brazilian import only now hitting American cinemas, two thick, simple, greasy slashes communicate a permanent state of wonder on the round head of the titular Boy, but look weary on the languishing heads of overworked adult characters desperate to exude confidence toward their children.
It's an expressive choice, as are most of director Ale Abreu's aesthetic decisions for this gorgeous, feature-length explosion of color. The prologue is enchanting. First a dot of color. Then we pull back from a circle inside a circle and past endless patterns and textures to the exterior of a rock the Boy finds. He then plays with a bucket. And sticks his head in a stream. He might as well have just been born.
We discover more and more of the World, which is largely rendered in crayon and colored pencil, right alongside the boy. Then a sheet of grey mist. And the departure of his father. The Boy lives with his mother on a prosperous field on the outskirts of a city his father is starting work in. As the Boy chases down his father, he spends time in the company of an aged cotton field worer and a twenty-something cotton factory worker who both bear subtle, suspicious resemblance to the Boy.
The factory worker also plays for money on a makeshift drum set that recalls the kitchen appliance cabaret from The Triplets of Belleville. Ale Abreu also shares that film's disdain for Americanized privilege: after witnessing the fate of processed cotton, we watch rolls of it being delivered to giant metropolises floating in giant, disc-shaped snow globes marked by gleaming eagle insignias. Abreu is crystal clear in his environmental message, which at one point turns over completely to a live-action montage of a polluted Brazilian city.
I appreciate Abreu's boldness, but this yanked me right out of the film, and I felt he made a much stronger case for anti-industrialization with animated sequences like a battle between a colorful bird fueled by a Brazilian street band, and a black one powered by the city (the film emerged out of Abreu's research for what would have been Canto Latino, an 'animadoc' about protest music that was performed in opposition to a 1960s Brazilian military dictatorship).
The key song 'Algeria', however, cements the bond between the Boy and his father, and as we rejoin an old character defeated by the cotton industry, we hear this song on a flute and are invited to remember why we held onto such a pure, optimistic view of an uncorrupted world in the first place. This is most visually arresting film nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar this year, and it is a shame it will lose to Pixar, which will take home another deserved but unnecessary win.
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