Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal (2010)

One of the great strengths of Waltz with Bashir (2008) is that it leaves you in no doubt why Ari Folman decided to make it as an animated film.  Although the images are disturbingly powerful, they nevertheless put Folman’s experiences in the Israeli army in Lebanon in 1982 at some kind of distance and, since one of the themes is how hard Ari in the film finds it to face those experiences, the distancing is expressive too.  Chico and Rita is a very different animated film for grown-ups.  Why did Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal choose this medium to tell the story of the repeatedly interrupted love affair of a jazz pianist and a dazzling girl singer who becomes a star, a story that begins in Havana in the late 1940s and ends in Las Vegas sixty years later?   It’s an unusual thing to do.  And this must be one of the first pieces of animation to contain violence and sex enough that it might have raised eyebrows with human beings doing the same things on screen.  (The film, which contains a fair amount of cartoon female nudity, has a 15 certificate.)  So the film-makers have their reasons but these don’t give Chico and Rita much substance.   I found it dreary because its form renders the ‘adult’ distinctiveness innocuous and because its clichés – this is a very familiar showbiz romance – aren’t meant to matter, because the animation is so technically ingenious.

In other words, Chico and Rita is a reminder that you expect less from a piece of animated cinema than from a live action film.  You expect it to be visually inventive and engaging (and this is).  You maybe also expect the moving drawings to be enhanced by a good soundtrack (Cole Porter songs and the music of Thelonious Monk and other stellar jazzmen see to that here).  The design and colouring of the cityscapes of Havana and New York and Paris and Vegas are very pleasing.  Trueba and Mariscal filmed people and gave this human ‘optical information’ to the animators.  It’s sometimes very striking to see how animation can present a particular expression or emotion so that it seems not only real but definitive.  But – unlike with human actors on screen – only one expression or emotion at a time (or, at the very most, as Sally – who really liked the film – argued, perhaps a facial expression at odds with a bodily attitude).  Rita is a caricature of Afro-Hispanic glamour; Chico always seemed a bit vacant to me and, as a result, a bit more interesting – although I wasn’t sure if the vacancy was intentional.  There’s a worrying sequence when he has a nightmare and it seems that, in deference to the era of screen musicals to which the film nods, a dream ballet is going to outstay its welcome.  It’s a relief that he wakes up quickly but it was also a relief to me when Chico and Rita was over.

8 March 2011