An up-and-down romance, but the music never quits
By virtue of its simple, stylized look - bold lines and color blocks - and effervescent Cuban jazz score, the Spanish animated feature Chico & Rita rises above its routine story of a troubled love affair between talented musicians.
By virtue of its simple, stylized look - bold lines and color blocks - and effervescent Cuban jazz score, the Spanish animated feature
Chico & Rita
rises above its routine story of a troubled love affair between talented musicians.
The movie opens as the aged Chico (voice of Eman Xor Oña), a Havana bootblack, looks out at the city and flashes back to pre-revolution days when he was a young piano player and ladies' man and fell for alluring songbird Rita (Limara Meneses).
Over the following decades, the relationship will have some ups and lots of downs. Rita will become a star in the United States, with Chico eventually following her to New York. There's much ado about the vagaries of musicians' lives, the corruption of showbiz, the pitfalls of passionate love.
Meanwhile, we hear a lot of outstanding music, and catch glimpses of various jazz stars (animated, of course), like Woody Herman, Ben Webster, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Chano Pozo, a Cuban percussionist who worked in Gillespie's band and came to a violent end.
(If you don't blink, near the end you'll notice a figure clearly based on Wim Wenders, without whose Buena Vista Social Club this film wouldn't exist.)
Chico & Rita is an Academy Award nominee for best animated feature.
In 1994, Chico & Rita director Fernando Trueba made the live-action feature Belle Époque, which won an Oscar for best foreign-language film, and in 2000, he made the documentary Calle 54 (also live action), about Latin jazz musicians. In Chico & Rita, he is working with the noted Spanish designer Javier Mariscal and animator Tono Errando.
The product of their efforts is so-so as movie love stories go, but then Chico & Rita is really about the music and the Mariscal's vision of Havana, New York, and Hollywood in the '40s and '50s - the nightclubs, the cityscapes, and street action.
The film boasts an original score by Cuban pianist and composer Bebo Valdés, who was featured in Calle 54.
Chico & Rita *** (out of four stars)
Directed by Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal, Tono Errando. With the voices of Eman Xor Oña, Limara Meneses. In Spanish with subtitles. Distributed by GKids.
Running time: 1 hours, 34 mins.
Parent's guide: No MPAA rating (some mature sexual content)
Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse EndText