Paulina Palero 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.

Sean Lamberger Wonderfully playful animation from Brazil in which a small boy experiences the dueling wonders and terrors of big city life for the first time. The artwork, clearly on showcase opposite a rather modest storyline, varies from light and expressive to rich and densely textured. It can be a real wonder to behold, especially during moments when the child's imagination takes over and the mechanical guts of an industrial zone become huge, towering, ignorant beasts. Virtually language-free (characters speak a made-up dialect once or twice), it's more universal for that decision and really doesn't need the crutch. Though it gets heavy-handed with environmental messaging late in the journey, the film rebounds nicely with an unexpected twist and brings a little mist to the eye for the final scene. An ambitious, often stunning peek at modern life, as seen through the disbelieving eyes we all shared at one time or another, and well worthy of the Oscar attention it received.

Dave McClain 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-"

popcorninhell Decades behind a computer, toiling and tinkering with the programming and software has given us the near-photographic realism of CGI animation. The culmination of which is the film Inside Out (2015) which won the Best Animated Feature Oscar this past year. Yet as anyone who truly loves animation will know, it's not about who has the most detailed techniques or the most expensive equipment. With great ideas and simple yet sublime stories, something as lo-fi as Boy and the World can move its audience to the core.The story begins with a young boy (Garcia) who lives in a rural abode near the jungle. His father (Campos), a mustached man sporting a straw hat and a flute, grabs a suitcase and heads to the city. the boy is heartbroken by his father's sudden absence and decides to head to the city to find him. On his odyssey he meets a host of colorful characters and comes face to face with the seductiveness, absurdity and danger of modern life.The animation is reminiscent of the work of Don Hertzfeldt. Everything is cobbled together with simple geometric shapes and seemingly done in charcoal and crayon. Yet unlike Hertzfeldt's work there isn't a sense of ruing existential doom; at its heart it is innately humanistic. Its simplicity and kaleidoscopic vision immediately strikes you with a sense of childlike wonder and as things in the story become more complex it washes over you in a flood of emotion and awe. The color palette in this film is so effective in rendering the wonder of the jungle, the bustling of the city and the rainbow-tinged weaving's of the Mestizo people that parade down the streets.It's important to note that the movie is largely non-verbal. What is uttered is dubbed in backward Portuguese and the only guiding light you're given are the visuals and the soundtrack. And what a neat soundtrack it is! Grupo Experimental de Musica (GEM), Emicida, Nana Vasconcelos and the Bushdancers all somewhat obscure Brazilian bands that help the story gently flow through you. Not since the early work of Hayao Miyazaki has there been a more genuine work of youthful artistic expression and such a full spectrum of unfettered emotion.A movie so deceptively simple and yet so emotionally complex comes around only once every few years, and an animation of this caliber comes round perhaps once in a generation. Some may not be hard won by it's environmental overtones and be contrarian to its thoughts on consumerism yet there's no denying that a story this human deserves attention and praise. Blink and you'll miss this little gem but if you can find it in theaters or (hopefully soon) on Netflix, I highly recommend it.