This full-length animation combines a wordless narrative (except for some moments of spoken gibberish) with highly imaginative, hand-created images to show a Brazilian boy’s experience in a changing world.

The film begins with kaleidoscopic zooming out through increasing levels of vividly coloured patterns and then settles into a richly textured home landscape for a child and his parents (all characters are represented as simply drawn and coloured stick figures). Their meagre home-grown food supply means that the father must leave the homestead in search of work, and our boy protagonist soon sets out to search for his dad.

The boy travels through many landscapes, some with natural beauty, but as his journey continues, he encounters farm labourers, fascistic military troops, robotic commuters, monstrous machines, and overpopulated flavelas, and the images change from intensely drawn colours and patterns to stark magazine cutouts or collages that show the mechanized world of industry, de-humanized cities, and insatiable consumer culture. The flow of movement is accompanied by stylized Brazilian music and repetitive percussion sounds and a bit of sudden, live-action footage of active deforestation emphasizes the film’s socio-political message.

This beautiful and intriguing film, carries a harsh and sadly familiar message about the aggressive development and displacement of rural poor in Brazil. Definitely a cartoon for an adult audience.

SCREENINGS:

Thursday Sept 25, 1:30 pm at SFU

Sunday Sept 28, 10:30 am at IN09

Thursday Oct 2, 7:00 pm at IN10

Get tickets here.