Ale Abreu’s Boy and the World is a feast for the eyes, ears and heart. The animated film tells the story of a young boy, Cuca, who lives in a small house in the country with his mother and father. When his father suddenly gets on a train and leaves them to look for work, Cuca decides to track him down and embarks on an excursion into the fluid world he inhabits.

The animation creates the impression of flipping through a child’s sketchbook. The crayon-like strokes that build the characters and the vivid colors depicting the environment imbue the world with a sense of wonder and imagination. The way one image transitions into another is as smooth as flowing water and raises the question: is what we are seeing real, a memory, or even a fantasy?

This aesthetic works well with a story that is all about change. As Cuca travels, he encounters various visual and audio motifs, which have specific meanings to his life. However, as he moves and look and sounds of his surroundings change these motifs return in different ways that give them new meaning. Cuca’s simple outlook is slowly expanded, like a child over the years adding more colors to their crayon set.

Another huge part of the film is the idea of nature vs. human progress. We see Cuca’s environment become slowly industrialized. This theme intertwines with Cuca’s gradual disenchantment with the world around him as the colors of his memory are muted and the curved swirling strokes of his home become straight lines and hard corners. The animals we see in the opening of the film are eerily echoed in the metallic buildings and rusted cranes Cuca becomes lost within later in the piece.

The soundtrack creates the same sense of wonder and fancy that the animation achieves, and musical cues are often used to ignite a memory from earlier in the piece that keeps Cuca, and the viewer, grounded in a place of constantly changing color and shape. Sound is also used as a way of conveying Cuca’s point of view. Mechanical sounds are mixed in with natural audio and vice versa, to create a sense of confusion a child must experience when entering foreign environments. Boy and the World is a visual and auditory delight. It simultaneously makes one nostalgic for simpler times and contemplative about one’s own effect in a world that's changing faster every day.