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A Masterpiece!

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Boy and the World (Brazilian Portuguese: O Menino e o Mundo) (2013) Director: Alê Abreu Watched: December 2017 Rating: 6/10 Colorful/playful, Children's drawings come alive, Kaleidoscope fun. Lively Brazilian soundtrack, Learn Latin America. Baffling/disordered, Only backwards Portuguese. Social change soapbox- Characters/plot take back seat; Rather see stills in art show. Somonka is a form of poetry that is essentially two tanka poems (the 5-7-5-7-7 syllable format), the second stanza a response to the first. Traditionally, each is a love letter and it requires two authors, but sometimes a poet takes on two personas. My somonka will be a love/hate letter to this film? #Somonka #PoemReview #Animation #LatinAmerca #NoDialogue #Propoganda

I've never written a review like this before, but after seeing the Brazilian animated feature "Boy Meets World" (PG, 1:20), I had almost no idea what I had just seen! There must've been something of quality up on that screen because this movie won plenty of film festival awards – both in the U.S. and overseas – and was a nominee at the 88th Annual Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature Film… but I'm still at a loss. In the year before I saw this movie, I had seen and reviewed 250 films (and 400 in the previous three years) and many of them were… "unusual" – American indies, foreign films from all over the world, films that were highly symbolic, films with plot holes, films in which the chronology of the story jumped all over the place, films with open-ended finales, etc., but none of those experiences prepared me for this one. But I do enjoy a challenge, so I'm still going to take a shot at describing this movie… Animated images, hand-drawn by writer-director Alê Abreu, tell the story of a small boy named Cuca who lives in a remote village in a fictional Latin American country. Cuca's father packs his suitcase and takes a train to the big city to find work. Cuca feels lonely and doesn't understand what his life has become, so he also packs a suitcase and takes the same train in search of his father. What unfolds before Cuca's eyes is a bewildering cornucopia of sights and sounds – from glittering skyscrapers to local musicians to an ominous-looking formation of soldiers marching in the streets. Little Cuca navigates this unfamiliar terrain with the help of a kind stranger, determined to find his father and reunite his family.Most of the images are simple line drawings, but they are very colorful, and there are bits of photo-realistic imagery mixed in with some of the scenes. While the boy's only facial features are oblong black eyes and rosy cheeks, the background of every scene contains a wide variety of shapes and colors. The shots of the train, for example, look like an animated photo of a train and the street signs in the big city are cropped, upside-down photos of what look like actual street signs. There is very little dialog and what's there is backwards Portuguese… but there's plenty of interesting music. Accompanying the varied imagery are examples of similarly varied Latin American musical styles, including pan-flute, samba and Brazilian hip-hop. In this film, the music is every bit as essential as the diverse and stunning visuals."Boy and the World" is an animated journey like no other, but would have been better if it were easier to understand. The basic story is easy enough to follow, but most of what happens along the way left me trying to figure out what I was seeing. The story is being told through the eyes of a boy who looks to be about four-years-old. Thinking about it that way, the movie makes sense. Unfortunately, I am not a four-year-old boy from a remote Brazilian village, so most of the movie didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. The director has said that he sees his film as a documentary of the history of Latin America. I didn't get that, although his efforts at contrasting urban vs. rural, rich vs. poor, and innocence vs. victimization do come across in a subtle and meaningful way. And, admittedly not to be lost in all this is a little boy's efforts to bring his family together again, and discovering the big, bad, confusing, wonderful world in the process. In spite of my own problems in watching this film, there is no diminishing the impressive creativity and artistry that went into making it… and maybe, at the end of the day (or the end of this review), that's all that really matters. "B-"

Reviewed by: Dare Devil Kid (DDK)Rating: 1.9/5 starsThe 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...?

Sweet, beautiful, wordless animated film, telling the charming, endearing and sometimes sad story of a young boy from the country going in search of his father who has moved to the city to earn money for the family. The film seems an attempt to see through a child's eyes, and it succeeds, leading to images that are surreal, wondrous and odd, and that don't always make literal sense. Imagine how the high tech modern world would seem to a small boy of say 5, wandering in alone from the countryside. The film captures that feelingDone in a simple, colorful, handmade style that's the opposite of most computer animation we see these days, recalling artists like Joan Miro, there's a heartfelt quality that goes with the handcrafted nature of its slightly surreal and beautiful images. Truly universal, there's not a single word of real dialogue, just some occasional gibberish-speak. There's also great Brazilian music that changes personality with the boy's adventures, along with a nice lesson for kids about the loss of the beauty of nature in the industrial world. Quite special.