Tito and the Birds Review: Imagined fear as a contagious disease has never looked so good in this beautifully-crafted piece of moving art.
With the world lost in a maddening political daze of late, Brazil’s dizzyingly beautiful animation Tito and the Birds feels like it arrived at the right time – an alarmingly timely allegory about a society riddled with fear struggling to find freedom.
Where fear remains a matter of mind for us, it has more an actual presence in Tito and the Birds: a physical ailment causing its victims to crumble into lumps. Our eponymous hero (Pedro Henrique) is caught between two sides: there’s his mother Rosa (Denise Fraga), one of the aforementioned victims of the fear and paranoia sweeping the country – brainwashed by rightist TV personality Alaor Souza (Matheus Solano) – and his father Rufus (Matheus Nachtergaele) – an outcast after an experiment gone wrong – who believes the treatment for the epidemic lies with the birds, having built a machine to communicate with them.
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Filmmakers Gustavo Steinberg, Gabriel Bitar, and André Catoto were clearly imbuing Brazil’s political anxiety at the time into the narrative – the film coming out at a time when the country was slipping into right-wing chaos. However, even in the UK, many months later, Tito rings with unhappy timeliness. The film’s central theme of “fear breeding catastrophe” is one that sadly doesn’t sit well in the stomach. We can relate. The story is clearly intentioned with political weight so it’s hard to dismiss the nature of it; it’ll certainly turn away many but it’s refreshing to see an animated film feel so mature in its themes given the target audience. Whilst many will go for the pretty colours and have the allegorical aspect fly right over their head, it does educate on the dangers of propaganda, paranoia, agendas, and fear. It’s perhaps a little too serious for its own good at times and the film can lose its sense of wonder by being quite heavy-handed in the messages it wants to convey but it’s admirable for its sheer audacity. This is a film that clearly wants to have its presence felt. And it does.
Of course, the animation is unequivocal. The film blends a slew of artistic styles into one and it’s a clash of colour and culture and visual splendour. It’s like we’re watching an oil painting come to life. The detail in every frame is impeccable too and even when the film can get a little too dull or heavy-handed for its own good, the animation is always stunning and constantly developing in a way that is utterly captivating to watch. Tito and the Birds has a refreshingly mature and political approach for a kids film; it’s a timely and terrifying story that is realised through impeccable visual-work but it’s too focused on being a message rather than a film. It’s entertaining but it takes itself way too seriously to have fun; the film is devoid of any awe-inspired wonder and the storytelling lacks much depth which is a little disappointing.
Tito and the Birds was reviewed at the Sydney Film Festival by Awais Irfan, June 2019.
