Movie Review: Tito and the Birds

Tito and the Birds *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Gabriel Bitar & André Catoto & Gustavo Steinberg.

Written by: Eduardo Benaim and Gustavo Steinberg.

 

I’m not one for complaining about kids today – or how easy they have it, or how lazy, spoiled and entitled they are all. But sometimes, when I watch a film like Tito and the Birds – a beautiful, animated film from Brazil – I do wonder a little if we can be overprotective of our children in North America. This is a dark film – a somewhat scary film, and a mature film that tackles some rather timely and complex themes – and yet it is still very much a film made for children. The filmmakers here trust the children in the audience to get what they are talking about – which they will likely do on a more basic, instinctual level – while the parents in the audience will see its more real world analogues. And more and more often when I see animated films from outside of North America, I see more mature films than we get – and I wonder if maybe we think our children don’t understand – or can’t handle – as much they really can.

 

Tito and the Birds is a film about Tito – a small, Brazilian boy of about 10, who still feels guilt about that time a few years ago where he messed up one of his inventor father’s experiments – resulting in his mother kicking his father out of the house for good. His father was working on a machine to communicate with birds (I know, it’s just something you kind of have to go with here) – and in the years since, Tito has continued to try and perfect that machine. That will become more important as a pandemic hits first the city, then the country, then the world – a disease brought on by fear, that gradually turns the people who catch it into big, round blobs with big eyes. There are those who go on TV to stoke those fears for their own personal gain – and then Tito and his friends who do everything possible to get things under control.

 

The backgrounds in Tito and the Birds look like beautiful oil paintings, that fittingly turn darker and darker as the film progresses – threatening to overtake the characters, and bath them in perpetual darkness. By contrast, the character design is deliberately cruder – not quite childlike, but not that far away either. Of course, when they change into those big blobs, they get even cruder. The contrasting styles works very well to give the film a strange, dark, interesting look and feel.

 

As a political allegory, the film is pretty straight forward – which is good for children, as they will be able to pick up on it. It’s not a simple left/right issue either – it’s more about how those in power use fear to try and control those below, and keep that power. There are certainly examples of that in Brazil – where the film is from – and around the world right now.

 

At only 73 minutes, Tito and the Birds gets everything done fairly quickly, which is a good thing. The premise of the movie is too goofy to really sustain much thought or much more than the 73 minutes. But it works while the movie is on, and makes for an interesting dark children’s film. It won’t be from everyone – or every child – but perhaps it shows that we can try and scare our children – at least a little bit more.