It would be difficult for the beginning of Alê Abreu’s Oscar-nominated second feature film, Boy and the World, to be any more minimalist than it is: the sort of crayon scribble a child might have drawn bouncing around a pure white landscape. Mimicking the formation of a young mind, more and more elements start to populate the initially blank canvas until it becomes a beautiful jungle of brushstrokes, pastels and collage. Yet greater complexity also brings with it greater ambiguity, danger and disillusionment, as the titular boy increases his understanding of how the world really is. Depicted are the horrors of consumerism and the exploitation of workers to meet the rapacious demand of the world economy, but Abreau’s remarkable hand-drawn aesthetic ensures that they are all still viewed through a lens of innocence and imagination. Cranes are depicted as enormous giraffes and container ships as vast duck-like creatures, a reminder both of the artificiality of our mechanised additions to the world and our dependence on them. Eventually, the didacticism reaches its apex when the screen momentarily catches fire to leave the viewer face to face with real-life footage of human impact on the earth behind the drawings. Despite its broad parabolic message, though, this is a deeply personal film: one that is about lost fathers as much as lost innocence (much in the same way as Boyhood, it recognizes the importance of the previous generation in defining the incipient one). The greatest attribute of Boy and the World, however, is the excellent sound design, which also builds in layers and is just as integral to the storytelling as the visuals. Ominous, discordant brass contrasts with playful strings and recorders with impressive attention to detail (the sound that is made by plucking a flower, for example, is the plucking of a harp). The absence of any comprehensible dialogue does not make Boy and the World a silent film; rather its adherence to subtle musical cues of emotion and environment arguably bring the viewer closer to the natural world than any screenplay could.
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