My Penguin Friend

If there's one truism in life that can never be overstated, it's that kids are tougher than you think. The whole wiki of memes about how Gen X grew up the way they did because they watched All Dogs Go to Heaven and Big Bird mourn for Mr. Hooper is kind of true – but then their grandparents sat through Old Yeller, so that may tell you something about the resilience of youth.

It's OK for kids’ films to talk about death and pain, as long as the story balances the darkest parts of life with hope, love, and joy. So it's OK that My Penguin Friend begins with a moment of almost impossible pain, when João (Reno), a fisherman in a remote coastal village in Brazil, loses his son in a storm. The devastation seems impossible to take in, but it’s told in a way that children will understand.

So where is the counterbalance? It comes after another tragedy, this time seen from the perspective of a penguin, setting off from the beach with all the other migrating aquatic fowl. Covered in oil from a maritime spill and almost dead, he is rescued by João, and they become lifelong friends.

If this story sounds familiar, it's probably because you read about it on some feel-good website, or maybe you bought the illustrated book An Old Man and His Penguin: How DinDim Made João Pereira de Souza an Honorary Penguin for a young relative. My Penguin Friend takes a few liberties (the real João was a bricklayer, not a fisherman) but the underlying story – that, for a decade, the penguin dubbed DinDim would return to stay with João before migrating the 5,000 miles to Patagonia for breeding season – is absolutely true.

All the standard moments of such feel-good animal films are there – a penguin’s eye view of the town, DinDim causing adorable chaos, and, of course, the implicit environmentalism. What’s fascinating is how the filmmakers don’t make it a Big Problem that’s too much for anyone to even contemplate tackling. The oil spill that nearly kills DinDim isn’t a Deepwater Horizon-scale catastrophe, but a small fishing boat with a leaky engine. João helps DinDim with some food and dish soap. Both problem and solution are small enough for a child to understand.

Much of the success of My Penguin Friend lies in the script by Kristen Lazarian and Paulina Lagudi, which unabashedly celebrates the standard beats of the “cutesy animal guest” subgenre without ever making DinDim seem like a cartoon or overly anthropomorphized. The key is in what DinDim reveals about animals – that they have often been written off as having no inner or emotional life, or memory. DinDim is never a little human, but a penguin, and that shows a restraint by the scriptwriters and by director David Schurmann. “He does what he wants,” João tells the fellow fishermen, and that's what makes My Penguin Friend so authentically charming. DinDim comes back because he wants to come back. He is his own living, independent self. He just happens to want to come back to João.

Just as the script keeps DinDim a bird, so the humanity of João is perfectly fleshed out. There’s a wonderful understatedness to Reno as the heartbroken fisherman. In less subtle hands, he would just be that most burnt-out of stereotypes, the heartbroken old loner who learns to love again because of a cute critter. Lazarian and Ulrich even steer clear of the old trope of his marriage collapsing (a mainstay of such family-friendly tearjerkers), instead maintaining a tender warmth between the kindly João and his equally endearing wife, Maria (Barraza|). Moreover, there’s a softness to this performance rarely seen in this master of stylish, often violent thrillers (Léon: the Professional, Ronin). João doesn’t learn to love again: He’s drowning in love while weighed down by guilt. With a calm, gentle humor, Reno captures how his guilt has crippled him, and how readily he can pour that love into DinDim.

My Penguin Friend is ultimately a charming story of quiet resilience and healing as much as it is about a man and a bird. May we all find such friends.