Tweet

A wonderful animated love story between jazz pianist Chico and sultry singer Rita, set in the vibrant jazz scene of the late 1940s and early 1950. It's a gorgeous film, says Mike McCahill.

This collaboration between Spanish director Fernando Trueba and the illustrator Javier Mariscal is as close to a fully-fledged musical as the animated form has come since Disney’s golden age – but its methods are altogether adult, setting out a love story with an eye for pop-cultural detail as assured as its grasp on the ways of the human heart. The title characters first meet in 1940s Cuba. He’s a pianist with busy hands. She’s a sexy nightclub singer. Onstage, the two are an ideal match; offstage, Chico’s womanising makes matters far less harmonious.

From Chico’s fumble through Stravinsky’s “Ebony Concerto” to the salsa rhythms of a Vegas ballroom, the music drives the action. Trueba keeps up a tempo to match his characters’ palpitating hearts, but proves alert to the affecting nuances that suggest both a weight of life experience and something more cinematic besides: that, as Pixar’s Up proposed, animation is infinitely better suited to conveying the passing of time than the bad wigs of so much live-action cinema. A gorgeous film.

 

Mike McCahill on 12th April 2011
View all 164 of Mike McCahill's reviews