23/05/2020
This weekend I have had a chance to watch a Brazilian animated adventure film Boy and the World(2013) which has a unique hand-drawing style and no clear dialogue in the whole storytelling. Its narrative tells that a boy living in countryside and growing in a natural place experiences his father leaving the family by train, then he feels unhappy and follows the track to a wilder world to find his father. He is picked up by an old peasant and starts his adventure of this sophisticating world from a cotton industry to a modern city. During his adventure, he encounters a poor craftsman and a pride of people in the street where also the army and weapons are standing in the opposite and stoping the pride. After this adventure, the boy turns into a teenager leaving his hometown by train as his father did before. And in the end he backs his home as an old man. Although there is no more ambiguous words in this film, the directer used the story board and creative transitions to connect the story, making sense of expressing a boy’s angle of watching this world. Or the whole animation with less dialogue can let audiences concentrate more on the drawing frames that depict the world in different aspects.
It is initially interesting to look at the unique style this film adopts in frames and character design. Unlike many mainstream animation films, this film mixes a hand painted picture-book style which could remind me of the crayon drawing each kid do in the childhood, and the digital editing in combination. Firstly, the main character boy is drawn as a simple button-like head with a red striped rubber tube-like body and four linear limbs, and like many other characters in this film, his eyes looks like button eyes as two black lines. This kind of facial design could not express more complex emotions, so in the most part of this film, many characters remain a similar facial expression. But in the contrast, they can show their feelings via actions and behaviours. Secondly, like the character style, the drawing frames use a same rough drawing style with simplistic and geometric shapes like round trees, rectangular cars and ships, linear objects and colourful balls. Some frames even use an abstract access like the post-modern style with hand-drawing objects to creating an experimental representation of describing daily works in industries, bringing a sense of mechanical homogenisation shown under the process of modern industrialisation. Moreover, these frames adopt many classic and impressive colours from real Brazilian cities including Slum and tall buildings, and the hybrid culture in Brazil, which reveal a rich and colourful Brazilian style. Thirdly, there are some tradition parts choosing moving patterns from macro world to micro world, and some parts in mixture with real life-recordings to enhance the perspective of criticising the destruction of nature. They all provide a fantastic picture of this story, and based on such style, the directer has put lots of metaphors in these frames like the mechanical producing process in the industry replacing the hand making, the capitalism turning workers into robots, the over-destroying of the nature, and the lack of happiness and embracing the nature.
However, personally, the most touching part of this film could be the feelings of home in the beginning and the end of this film. At start, the boy looks so missed about his leaving father and even follows his dad’s footstep to leave home. But in end when he grows up as a teenager and opens the gift given by his mom on the leaving train, it is shown as a cap as same as the one the craftsman is wearing. Till here, I just realised that the craftsman and peasant the boy meets are actually the boy himself at different ages, and the trip in this film is more like a retrospect of the boy’s whole struggling life in the city. So in the end when he becomes the old man backing his home and finding nothing but a broken house, he ends up with an imaginary scene that he turns into the little boy’s status again and sleeps in the arms of his mother with his father playing music. It shows that whether how difficult he experiences outside the world, the home appears to be an eternal place that he finally returns and feels safe and peace in the heart. What is more, The director made a nexus between the opening scene as a zooming out shot from a point to a beautiful pattern in an external world, and the ending scene as a zooming in shot from this beautiful external world to a point in an internal world. And there are also two similar leaving scenes where the boy’s mon reveals a similar gesture and worried facial expression. It seems that the mom has become a symbol of the home and safety in this boy’s mind.
We might losing the main point in the middle of this film because the director put a lot in the drawings. But it dose not go so far. By the end, this film still backs to the home scene, making a different feeling from the beginning: whether how complexly the outside world is changing, the home remains the same in the boy’s mind. Here, the home and the world look like a contrasting meanings to the boy.