The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation (2005) Reviews

• An Artist Uses All The Considerable Talent at His Command to Revenge on and Reconcile With His Father

  noralee2006-03-02

  "The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation" is like a visit to Oprah's couch for dysfunctional families crossed with "The Sopranos" and PBS's "American Experience" but through magical animation. Director/co-writer John Canemaker tells a presumably autobiographical story that makes Noah Brumbach look like he was too easy on his father in "The Squid and the Whale." It brings genealogy to life in a uniquely beautiful way. Canemaker uses a dazzling array of animation styles and techniques, from black and white photographs to colorful childish drawings and much, much more, to tell the raw story of his bullying Italian immigrant father and his fraught relationship with him. He is like a wizard calling forth all the considerable creative talents at his command to not just recreate the vanished world of his and father's pasts but to try to effect an impossible reconciliation. It's like he is clenching and unclenching his fists throughout the film. While Faulkner-like the past is never past, he goes to extraordinary visual lengths to try and understand how he and his father became the men they are and were. I can't think of any animated short I've seen before where I was so more emotionally involved in the story than in the images. As narrators, John Turturro as The Son and Eli Wallach as The Father (with the non-Anglicized version of the director's last name) eerily capture a tale that swings from light-hearted to horrific, sweet to scary, angry to sympathetic. It is a very unusual perspective on The American Dream across all of the 20th century as it swings back and forth from bitter and cynical to loving and almost forgiving. The film incidentally illustrates an aspect of Italian immigration that has been documented by historians, such as Mark Wyman's "Round Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930" and Betty Boyd Caroli's "Italian Repatriation from the United States, 1900-1914" but not generally in popular culture. This film was viewed as part of a commercial screening of Oscar nominated shorts.

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• Great animated movie about the story between an Italian father and his son

  jeremy-giroux2006-06-20

  This animated film is absolutely wonderful. The drawings are really simple (it can't be compared to "Cars" or other "big" animated movies) but there's so much emotion and creativity that you go out of this film deeply moved and absolutely fascinated. It's the kind of film which makes you want to make animated films, thinking that it's something great and making you think something you didn't think before : animated films can be sometimes more powerful than any other films. The voice of John Turturro has something to do with it, both melancholic and angry. What really defines this film is "true feeling" and "simple". It's something very creative and new : the story told is a true story. Sometimes, true photos or newspapers are put into the film. It creates a wonderful mix between the reality and the dream, a true person and his image and for the director, between the desire of rediscovering his childhood and the fear about it. It's very sad as the father died before the film was made and it's strange what someone who didn't talk can say to his child and how love can impersonate itself in our lives and stories.

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• Unusual and painful...and probably not a film that will please most viewers

  MartinHafer2008-04-11

  This film was the winner of the Best Animated Short Oscar for 2005. When I saw the film, I was a bit surprised, as it didn't seem THAT interesting, though it certainly was innovative in style. The film is an imagined conversation between a son and his dead father and its told through very splashy and simple animation along with photographs. At first, it all seems rather sweet, as the son seems to miss his dad and begins to talk to the ghost-like memory of him. However, instead of just fond memories, you see that the son is asking and even demanding to understand why Dad was such a horrid person. In fact, as the film continues, it's a bit hard to watch. It feels like watching an episode of "Dr. Phil" when a grown child confronts their abusive and neglectful parent. This is all well made and very creative but also very painful and difficult to watch. From a psychological point of view, it is very interesting but I wonder how many people will be willing to watch this in its entire painful entirety.

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• personal

  Polaris_DiB2006-05-12

  I have to admit that this film has two very important and creative aspects to it. Firstly, it uses a lot of different styles of drawing and mixing of other footage to create its animation. Secondly, it's about the only stream-of-consciousness animation (or even film) I've ever seen, which is fundamentally important because the very process of making a film (and especially an animated one) is slightly too labor intensive to be stream-of-consciousness. Those are both very neat aspects that make this an original and unique experience pleasant to behold. But what it is, really, is anticlimactic. As the dialog in the film itself states, it is the movie he promised, but not the one expected. Furthermore, while the story is gritty and real, and the emotion effect profound, there's still a large level of personalness to it that isn't very audience-engaging. Obviously the poor guy who made this has some stuff to work out, but does that stuff need to be a dialog with the audience? It's a dialog in his mind, and has all the features of a dialog in the mind, but one thing that's different between a dialog of the mind and an imagined dialog to share with an audience is that the latter has a completely different language to it beyond the regular aspects of a spoken language (in this case English). When holding a conversation with oneself in one's own head, even giving another voice to the other side of the conversation, there are unspoken and completely understood interpretations that are useless to even convey in the conversation because both voices automatically understand them being from one source. When creating a discourse to be understood by an outsider, there's a different means of presentation that involves an almost structurely linear (even in stream-of-conscious) presentation of events that either reveals slowly or can hold off information 'til the end, requiring multiple viewership in order to fully extract its needs. This film is caught up in the circular and arbitrary motions of the internal conversation without a good structural presentation for an audience, thus making some of its scenes superfluous and repetitive and making other assumptions about things the audience should understand that they don't. In the end, this short is such a personal production that it needn't have any audience but the guy who wrote it at all. I'm not saying that just because something is personal means it shouldn't be shared. I'm saying that somewhere there must be a compelling engagement with the audience for them to share in the personal aspects, which this film doesn't provide. It's a well-done work of art, it just doesn't take the responsibility of narration. I'm glad he got it out of his system though. --PolarisDiB

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• Deservedly won an Oscar last year, much as Ryan won the year before

  llltdesq2006-12-14

  This short is a combination of animation, still photos and what look like home movies in trying to create an imaginary conversation between a father and his son. Like Ryan, which was an animated look at the life and troubles of animator Ryan Larkin's life, this short looks at very real people and situations and, like Ryan, it also won the Oscar for Animated Short. Because I want to at least touch on some of the details, this is a spoiler warning: This short is a conversation going on in the head of its creator, John Canemaker between he and his father and is basically Canemaker's questioning his father about his actions and the events in his life which wound up putting the father on trial for arson and eventually resulting in the incarceration of his father for five years. It's a fascinating story, told primarily by the voices of the father and son, ably done by actors Eli Wallach and John Turturro. Anyone who says that voice work isn't really truly a full acting performance may technically be right, but the performances in this short should at least prove that you can turn in a memorable performance even if you're just providing the voice alone. Just about every emotion you would expect to come out in a conversation between a parent and a child with a significantly adversarial relationship is found here-anger, rage, frustration, irritation, accusation, pain and love are quite apparent in both men as the son tries to find out what precisely happened and why his father went to jail for arson for five years in the early 1950s. As you get deeper in, however, it becomes clear that this is just the most significant problem in a string of problems between father and son, most revolving around the father's temper and the short fuse which causes that temper to be frequently displayed. The animation is simple but quite effective and appropriate to the subject matter. At times, the animation appears to be deliberately child-like and it feels like Canemaker is trying to show the reaction of a confused, frightened and hurt eight year old (which was how old he was when his father went to jail). The animation basically fits with the mood of the short. This short is really difficult to describe in words which will do it justice, as it really should be seen. Fortunately, it and most of the other 2005 shorts nominees are available on a compilation DVD featuring all five Live-Action Shorts and three of the five Animated Shorts (the other two animated nominees weren't included because Pixar presumably had plans to release One Man Band and 9 has been optioned to be turned into a feature film). Highly recommended.

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