I do not at all like it when a movie makes me think! EVERYTHING should be told to me! Not a single detail should not be thought provoking, nor engaging! that's what brilliant masterpieces such as skyscraper, Incredibles 2 (the first one was horrifically awful), and Starwars: episode II: The phantom clone sith. It's animation is HORRIBLE!!! because it lacks TRADITIONAL 3 DIMENSIONAL COMPUTER GENERATED ANIMATION! IT LOOKS LIKE IT'S DONE IN CRAYON AND PASTEL PAINT! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BE OCCUPIED BY IMAGERY GOING INTO MY BRAINLESS SKULL!!!!!! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO HAVE FUN WHILE WATCHING A MOVIE, IF I HAVE TO INTERPRET ITS MEANING WITH MYYYYY HEEEEEAD!Overall, I would highly recommend this film to find that review to be satyrical. If you agreed with any of the points I made, don't watch. Just go ahead and watch what those other filthy bumbloids are watching. Skyscraper just came out, awful movie but if you wanna see it, go ahead. Peace yo

The film was nominated at the 88th American Academy Awards for best animated feature and lost to 'Inside Out', but won one at Annie Awards out of three nominees. Originally from Brasil, a 80 minutes long, I mean short film, excluding the opening and end credits which makes it even shorter. The tale was told with the beautiful visuals and music, without any dialogues to reach the audience making no complication. Because it was not just an entertainer, but a message bearer.The animation type was simple, yet awesome. All the drawings were done by the director himself. Totally colourful crayons sketches. It was supposed to be a documentary, but later became a feature film. The story about a boy who lives with his parents in the rural growing up loving all the wonders of the nature. He observes the changing world as his father bids a goodbye to him to look for a better job in the city, but never returned. So the curious little kid who loves his father very much takes us an adventure when industrial revolution taking place. The rest of the film tells whether he finds what he's looking for.There were many animations got released in the same year, but this film got the Oscars nod because of the strong message. Especially in the present world this kind of film brings more awareness to the people. It focused the theme man destroying the beautiful world for the profit and dumping the waste everywhere. I am sure you might have seen several documentary films on this topic, but this one was different which was somewhat close to 'Earth 2100'. Although it talks about the past and present than the distant future.The pollution was one of the biggest concerns today and nobody cares to curb it. The industrial revolution is not defining our progressive, but threatening to our future generation. Besides the poors are directly affected by the loss of the employment. The human development in on the right direction, but the path we have chosen was not. So by now you know it is not for just the kids. The film offers a lot for adults to learn from it than the children. But surely a film to them both watch together and have a good time.At one point, for a quick, a few real clips were shown to let us know what the real world looks like after such thing happened as it was shown in the film. I loved the comparison between the city and the rural, from lifestyle, fading culture to everything. The real heartbreaking scene is when the boy revisits his old place to learn it is destroyed. Surely we all have similar kind of experience in our life about the place we had admired some time ago is now completely ruined.It might have not won the Oscar or not popular as the one won, but definitely not ignorable film. All the other four nominees stood behind creativity and entertainment, but this one was with dual intention and it succeeded. It wins our heart more than any prestigious awards in the world, yet I agree the awards leads to the wider recognisation. So I urge everybody to watch it sooner or later, but never to miss it. It is not your Disney, Pixer or Ghibli films, but surely you would enjoy it. I don't know the director, but I think if he resumes with the same intensity for the future projects, he would definitely become the South American Tomm Moore with his unique animation and storytelling.8/10

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.

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-"