This Brazilian animated feature is an incredibly timely film. Using a combination of oil paint and digital enhancement, it creates a world just a hair over the brink of insanity from where we currently live: The people are suffering from a disease, a form of paralysis, brought on by fear. It’s not physically contagious; fear spreads through ideas. (Fear also drives consumerism, and the powers-that-be encourage people to buy into a Dome Garden, a Truman Show-like human terrarium that can protect them from the driving forces of fear.)
Tito (Henrique) is the son of a doctor/inventor (Nachtergaele) who believes the cure for this disease can be discovered by relearning to communicate with birds, pigeons specifically. They’re described as “free and rejected” and have a peasantlike charm. According to the mythology, different types of birds used to warn humans of dangers to come: Earthquakes, floods, war, etc. But we forgot how to listen.
The color palette alternates between earthly tones and sickly yellows and greens, the vibrancy of an impending nuclear wasteland. There’s a realism to the characters – faces are asymmetrical, knees are knobby, teeth are crooked. Even the 10-year-olds look world-weary. There’s also a sense of the grotesque, a folklore that rings of the Brothers Grimm, and the macabre that draws directly from Tim Burton’s work; even the opening score owes much to Danny Elfman. Yet while the music creeps and awes, the pace of the action nibbles and pecks – here and there a bit choppy, hard to follow. The plot gets a little more complicated than it needs to.
In the final stages of the fear disease, a person essentially becomes a rock – described on a news report as “useless,” a term that is right at home in a hypercapitalistic society that objectifies the working class: You cease to produce labor so you may as well cease to exist. The metaphors land like heavy machinery – quick and devastating. Teo, the archetypal rich-kid school bully, looks like a long-lost Trump son and that surely isn’t a coincidence. The story, though structurally flawed, is an artful portrait of modern life: the 24-hour news cycle, class warfare, and rampant overconsumption leading to crippling anxiety and burnout, even in the young. It’s sadly all too familiar: Too late to be a cautionary tale, it reads more like society’s distorted self-portrait.
This article appears in February 8 • 2019.