User Reviews

Don't let the colorful animation of Boy and the World to distract you from its deep obscure meaning. From the beginning, I thought this was going to be another animated movie for kids but boy was I wrong. Boy in the World is about a Brazilian boy whose life is destroyed. His dad leaves to go find work and the boy want to go find him but instead he finds a terrible world where he is lost. The boy is more of a symbol in the movie, he represents the people of Brazil and how they have suffered because of modernization and capitalism. We can see how the other characters of the movie lose their humanity when they become factory workers or film workers. They are nothing to their country but a source of money. They work all day and they live in terrible conditions. We see a contrast of color and sound in some scenes specifically the ones were the people were being oppressed which give it a darker connotation. But the most effective scenes where not the animation one but when they show small clips of the real world and how bad things really are. A break from the fantasy and a crash into reality.

The movie is a critique of the world we live in and how some people are lost to this society. People are stripped of their lives and are forced to become nothing but and income to those in charge and those in charge clearly don't care about them. The fact that the boy's dad is never found shows just how lost people really get in this world sometimes. I found the movie to be extremely effective at getting its message across. I couldn't stop thinking about this movie for a week after I watched it, it will really make you consider and look with a critical eye what is going on in the world now days. We can let other people be stripped of their humanity there must be something we can do.

(No plot spoilers, but thematic spoilers.)

Yes, this film is, though you may not suspect it at first, about our broken relationship with nature. The city is the bad place, technology is bad, and nature is good and pure. And you can be sure that this message is not handled with any subtlety - at all.

But, I loved this film. And not just because of its magnificent images or because of its brilliantly cute character design.

The message of the film may be an old one and one we have heard many times before. But the way it is shown is unique and utterly impressive. I sat in the cinema today and cried, which I did not do for a very long time. Yes, it is very emotional and extremely passionate, and also relentlessly honest. I was ashamed and deeply sad when I left the theater. And because of its honesty I love it. And because there is truth in this message, there is no way around it. We hurt and destroy our world. And how can we bear seeing this cute boy watching all these grown-ups acting like this, destroying this wonderful, wonderful nature? We can't. And there is a reason why we can't. I think it is because we know that it is wrong.

Well, you'll have to experience it for yourself. Please do. I can promise you that you have never seen anything like it before.

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...?

The simplistic and almost childish animation style of this film still manages to convince an adult viewer to believe in the existence of and get involved in the world that it is depicting. How is this made possible? The world we see on the screen is given life by the colorful and creative use of sound and music. Despite the fact that the little amount of dialogue in the movie is unintelligible, it does not mean that it bears no significance. The utterances of reversed Portuguese can still be interpreted in combination with the images and what we know of the story. Interestingly enough, these pieces of dialogue were not recorded in normal order and then reversed. In that case it would not sound as natural as it does now. This approach to the lack of real dialogue is supported by an interview with the director Alê Abreu in the Brazilian magazine Revista da Cultura. In this interview he explains that The Boy and the World actually emerged from the idea of an animated documentary called Canto Latino about the formation of Latin America until the period of dictatorships. This documentary would use music, such as the songs of protest from the 1960s and '70s, to guide the story. Instead, Abreu was inspired to make an animated fiction film which still used the principle of music as a guiding force behind the story. However, another motivation for the original use of dialogue is that the film is following the boy's perspective which causes the dialogue and other linguistic utterances to be a scrambled mass of (familiar) sounds. The boy experiences the world as a child who does not yet understand the harsh reality which his parents are well aware of. The intention to show the movie and the world through the boy's eyes is explicitly brought to the attention of the audience through the title of one of the film's theme songs Aos olhos de uma criança (In the eyes of a child) sung by the rapper Emicida. The entire story is connected by one single leitmotif in the score which is first played as source music by the father and then repeated to remind the spectator of the boy's goal during his adventure. This song also connects sound to image and creates an organic unity between the two sides of the medium. Whenever someone plays the song, colored bubbles appear and float into the sky. This visualization of music supports the story by forming a metaphor for the battle between the civilians and the military. One of the characteristics of the soundtrack, which attracted me to the discussion of this particular film, is the mixture of sound effects and musical elements. Some clear examples of this mixture of sound effects and music are the sounds of various animals, such as chickens, a butterfly, and a horse, but also the sounds of traffic which are mixed with the percussion and special sound installations, or even the sound of picking a flower which is replaced by the pluck of a violin string. This unexpected use of musical instruments gives more color and character to the images on the screen and also emphasizes the child's perspective on the world. The soundtrack was constructed with contributions from Naná Vasconcelos, Emicida, Barbatuques, and GEM (Grupo Experimental de Música). Especially Naná Vascocelos, Barbatuques, and GEM played an important role in the creation of music that could be either part of the score or part of the Foley, SFX, and ambiance, and even function as a musical kind of wallah, which adds a threatening undertone to the scenes of the military in the big city. All three bring their own style and expertise to the mix which creates an extremely original and creative sound. Naná Vasconcelos is a vocal artist and percussionist who even uses pots and pans to find the perfect sound for a scene. Both Barbatuques and GEM are groups of musically talented people. However, there is a big difference between the methods of both groups. While the Barbatuques musicians use body percussion and create rhythms with voice effects and different kinds of claps, snaps, and feet stamps, the GEM musicians use fantastical instruments and sound installations which are invented and created by themselves to create a perfectly customized and original sound. Thanks to the wide range bastidores (backstage) material displayed on the film's website, it is possible to see short clips of the production process of all these different artists and their individual music styles.

(Flash Review)

This is a uniquely animated film, with crude yet charming illustrations, and is rather original as it has zero dialog. Just appropriate music and some sound effects. The main story is simple yet also hard to follow, of a boy in search of his father that left him at a young age. The boy leaves home and goes on an adventure from sunny cotton fields to the big city. He starts off carefree and dreamy-innocent and as he learns about the world, he sees many bad things going on with it. Que many heavy-handed scenes of big city = bad and polluting factories = evil towards people and the planet. Not that these aren't noble causes but they became the focus over his father search. They were told in a shallow and well-worn manner and for a couple minutes inserted in real deforestation footage. That point was made loooong before; real footage not needed and took me out of the film's neat atmosphere. Overall, nifty visuals and creative ways to visualize most every scene. Fun illustrations but the story could use finessing.

You want to see a terribly animated film that's worse than Foodfight? Here it is, folks, the bottom of the barrel of animation.

Boy and the World is by far the worst animated film I have ever seen, as its boring story and eye-bleeding character designs don't help at all.

The animation in this movie is really cheap, even when it tried to mix in hand-drawn animation and digital animation, which comes off really poor.

The character designs are extremely ugly and horrible to look at. However, this movie keeps having the characters looking at the screen, which is very unsettling to stare out.

The story is really...really...really...really boring. It was at first a rescue mission to rescue Cuca's (yes, that's the name of the "Boy" in the title) father, now it's just Cuca exploring the world. And at the end, Cuca never finds his father. In fact, the ending was just confusing. Did Cuca grow up or what?

Great job, GKIDS, thanks for letting me get off to a great start in reviewing in IMDb. Anyways, please don't watch this film. If you see it on Netflix or any DVD or Blu-Ray store, boycott it.