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Boy and the World is not subtle in its political ideals, and the introduction of this element is jarring and clunky, but I’ve never seen another movie that looked quite like it. When it’s working its particular charms, it’s transporting and invigorating, a collection of geometric patterns rendered as colorful as possible. It’s in these moments that Boy and the World works best.
Some may complain that beautiful visuals for the sake of beautiful visuals are empty cinematic calories, but I say they’re wrong. Boy and the World looks like a pre-school child’s highly imaginative drawings brought to two-and-a-half dimensional life. At times it looks like it was drawn with crayons, other times like pastels, maybe even colored pencils, and it’s hypnotic in its purity.
Then it introduces its political concepts, heavy-handed messaging about industrialization and the disparity between the haves and have-nots. These themes are not anything new, and they’re not presented in any exciting way. The incorporation of live-action footage becomes incredibly distracting despite only being a few minutes worth of material. The longer the film goes on the darker it becomes, leaving behind the sweetness and innocence of the first forty minutes for a hard-eyed cynicism.
But I still greatly enjoyed the whole experience. The music is joyful and infused with the rhythms of Brazil, the country it’s imported from, and it frequently works in glorious harmony to punctuate the visuals. And those visuals! Numerous images are breathtaking in their simplistic beauty and wonderment. The music and joy of the common people fuses into the presence of a gigantic colorful bird in one scene, and in another hills transform into waves in a frightening storm.
It may not be completely coherent in its narrative, there’s no dialog besides some gibberish and all of the characters look exactly alike, or tonally consistent, but it’s worth the effort to seek it out. GKids goes out of its way to find charming, unique, daring and beautiful animated films from around the world to bring to the US, and this is another of their great finds. Boy and the World is unlike any movie I have ever seen, and for that I am grateful.
