Boy & the World
2014 · Directed by Alê Abreu
Original language: Portuguese
- animation
- fantasy
- adventure
- family
The story
Suffering because of his father's departure to the big city, a boy leaves his village and discovers a fantastic world dominated by bug-engines and strange beings. An unusual animation with various artistic techniques that portrays the issues of the modern world through the eyes of a child.
What it’s like
Hand-drawn figures float across wide, flat fields of colour: a child's simple pencil lines set against washes of ochre, indigo and grey, with collage, scratched textures and passages of crayon and paper cutout shifting from scene to scene. The light is often gentle and diffuse, like a dim morning in a village, then turns harsh and mechanical as the frame fills with machines and smoke. The score leans on wordless vocal melodies, guitar and rhythmic percussion, with long stretches of near silence. The pace is loose and dreamlike, drifting rather than driving, and the mood sits somewhere between wistful and quietly unsettling, a tender sense of loss that gradually widens into curiosity about a changing world. Violence is absent; there is some menace in the industrial scenes, but it reads as dread rather than harm, and nothing is graphic. Suited to a slow, reflective evening, a child-like wonder mood, or anyone curious about experimental animation, this is for people who want a gentle, visually inventive journey about loneliness, family and modern life.
More films like Boy & the World
Closest in mood, pacing and theme. Tell us why you loved Boy & the Worldand we’ll explain which ones fit you.
