Butler's Cinema Scene

"Chico & Rita"...not for the kids

“CHICO & RITA” My rating: B (Opening April 13 at the Tivoli)

94 minutes | No MPAA rating

Animation has so long been the domain of the family crowd that when we encounter something aimed at grownups (“Persepolis,” “Waltz With Bashir”) it’s easy to go overboard.

The Irish-made, Spanish-language “Chico & Rita” is a musical love story spanning a half-century. It was one of the films nominated this year for the Oscar for animated feature, but lost to “Rango” (which isn’t precisely a family film, either, though kids no doubt enjoy it).

“Chico…” is clearly not for the kids. Not with animated nudity and sex. And in any case, this effort from directors Tono Errando, Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba is about emotions way over the heads of children, who will quickly grow bored.

But for music- and romance-loving adults, it’s a small feast.

It begins in the present with an old man, Chico, sitting in his Havana apartment listening to the radio. An old recording is played and Chico — and the audience — are transported back to the pre-Castro days of the late 1940s, when Havana was a wide-open town filled with gambling, girls and especially music.

Chico (voiced by Eman Xor Ona) is a piano player hitting the Havana nightclubs. There he first hears Rita (Limara Meneses), a sultry singer with moves to match her voice. The chase is on.

The screenplay by Ignacio Martinez de Pison and Trueba follows the couple’s off-and-on relationship — on because they have unquenchable hots for one another, off because Chico always seems to stray with another woman.  They win a talent contest with a song written by Chico and sung by Rita, move to New York, then Paris. They finally break up. Rita finds stardom in the movies and gets a gig starring in a big Las Vegas show, a deal she blows by ranting from the stage that she can sing in the resort but has to sleep in a cheap motel across town because of her race. (Oh, did I not mention that both Chico and Rita are unambiguously black?)

Times Square in the early '50s

The animation of “Chico and Rita” is in some ways deliberately primitive (the hand-drawn characters are nowhere near the photorealism found in today’s computer animation) and in others (especially the astonishingly detailed backgrounds and lighting effects) terrifically sophisticated.

Perhaps the film’s strongest selling point is its music, a rich aural tapestry of period sounds from salsa to be-bop. You’ve got to love an animated film in which Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Herman and Tito Puente all show up as characters.

“Chico & Rita” suffers from the predictability of its plot, but the execution is frequently spectacular.

| Robert W. Butler

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