Zoom in some ways is a graphic novel come to live although segments of the story is in cartoon form.It is a multi layered story with an absurd look at sex. The opening scene is the story of Emma who works in a factory painting sex dolls and has sex with co-worker and boyfriend at lunch. Emma wants a cosmetic procedure to have bigger breasts. When she has them they turn out to be too big she gets attention for all the wrong reasons.Too make her boobs normal will cost her money which she does not have, she and her boyfriend get involve in a scheme that involves transporting stolen drugs inside one of the sex dolls.Emma is also a comic book artist and she has created a story of a bombastic action film director, Edward who is about to hit the big time with a big budget film and he is a babe magnet to boot. This part of the story is animated . However Edward has confidence issues when in anger Emma reduces the size of his manhood. Now his first cut of the movie is too arty, he upsets the female film executive and his dinky is too little to satisfy women. Edward is ordered to go to Brazil to shoot the climax of his movie.The movie is that of a Brazilian model, Michelle with aspirations of being a novelist. Her boyfriend tells her that people only say good things about her writing as they fancy her. When her publisher is impressed with her writing she goes off to Brazil for inspiration.Eventually all three strands come together in a circular fashion as the characters realise that they are all influencing each other.The ending is chaotic and contrived. The film is off beat but also messy and the characters are too one dimensional.

The main idea is great: a story telling a story which is telling the first story. But the stories are crap when you look at them one at a time; one is about sex and boobs, the second about sex and a penis, and the third has the least sex, but the most convoluted plot (which actually makes sense in context).The acting, cinematography, and the art style of the drawn sections were good, but not enough to overcome the fact it feels like a porno trying to disguise itself as art. I kept watching hoping for improvement; I should have watched something else entirely.I recommend Stranger Than Fiction (2006) or The NeverEnding Story (1984).Inkheart (2008) and Pixels (2015) are more rewatchable than Zoom.

Even though only a section of the film is animated using rotoscope, the whole movie has an indi comic feel, like Love and Rockets of Ghost World (which was made into a film) The animation looks like it's the same as A Scanner Darkly, possible done by the same animation team, but in A Scanner Darkly it seems like the animation was a bigger arch.It's an interesting circle about three people. Emma who works at a Factory that makes sex dolls, draws pictures of herself being a beautiful busty femme fatale, an image that the guy she's sleeping with finds absurd. In retaliation, she draws her dream guy, Eddie, a hot Spanish action film director who's doing a film he plans to use to take himself serious, but comes across a little problem when Emma, unhappy with her new boobs decides to get rid of the "package" that made him a hot commodity in Hollywood, and effects the making of his film about Michelle, a Brazilian model tired of being judge on her looks, who goes home to write a novel that just so happens to be about Emma.It's a nicely layered story and becomes very surrealistic, as all three story tellers take us through their creative process, and if anyone knows anything about the creative process, the story goes through constant changes which switches the tone in order to make the story work. It's a very unformulated movie that goes from the tame to the outrageous, and keeps me captivated with some very interesting personas moving on the screen. cinemagardens.com

Just saw this at TIFF several nights ago. It was a welcome change as the movies I had seen up to that point were excellent, but very heavy. In math there is this concept of a complex number consisting of a real part and an imaginary part. Many things in nature cannot be modelled by a real number alone, but need complex numbers. So the analogy in life is that we have our imaginary life and visions and these in turn influence are real lives which in turn generate more visions etc. They both exist together and not separately. The movie is a mixture of film and animation and it works very well. Emma draws a character who directs a movie who's actor is writing a novel. They all interact and involve each other. Very amusing, nice mixture of Canadian and Brazilian humour.