Spanish with English subtitles
There is light and beauty, even in the darkest of worlds. Stranded on an island in a post-apocalyptic world, teenager Dinky and her friends hatch a dangerous plan to escape in the hope of finding a better life. Meanwhile, Dinky’s old friend Birdboy has shut himself off from the world, pursued by the police and haunted by demon tormentors. But unbeknownst to anyone, he contains a secret inside him that could change the world forever.
Based on a graphic novel and short film by co-director Alberto Vázquez and winner of the Goya Award for Best Animated Feature, Birdboy: The Forgotten Children is a darkly comic, beautiful, and haunting tale of coming of age in a world gone to ruin.
Press
“A dark animated delight!” – Indiewire
“Captivating!
A feast of hallucinatory visual delights an astonishingly visceral horrors.” – Slant Magazine
“An animated beauty!” – Village Voice
“Bleak, dark, and unforgettable!
A haunting pleasure.” – Screen Anarchy
“Visually dazzling!” – RogerEbert.com
“Fascinating in its oddball complexity. Among the many vastly more expensive, live-action dystopian visions of recent cinema, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything as original or surprisingly poignant.” – Dennis Harvey, Variety
“Co-directors Vázquez and Pedro Rivero’s strikingly original film won the Goya (or Spanish Oscar) for best animated feature. Recommended.” – Kathy Fennessy, Video Librarian
Notes on Film
The graphic novel is actually a couple of things together. When I started drawing, I was very young and I didn’t have much experience. But I realized soon enough that, by creating my own world, you can speak about anything you feel, and want. If you create your own rules, you’re the owner of everything.
The comic is the complete [culmination] of several things. I’m from an area in Spain where, during the ’80s, the whole of heroin trafficking went through. That really made an imprint during my teenager years, and that was my jumping off point. Then, there’s a lot of themes that were added into the short film and the film, like pollution—how pollution reaches the inside of the characters—and the full story is actually like a metaphor of teenagers.
It was a very classic process. It’s traditional animation, frame-by-frame, hand-drawn. We wanted the characters to be well integrated with their backgrounds. One of the characteristics of the backgrounds is the use of color. They [feature] very expressive colors, and it’s not nature-based at all. It’s very freehand in form, with textures that come more from the world of graphic novels, from drawings in paper. We also applied that to the characters. They also have textures. We wanted it to be very handmade, just like a book.
I’ve always liked post-apocalyptic worlds and dystopias. It’s a way of speaking of what could happen, and what the future might bring to us. We’re very worried about climate change and pollution. It’s something global, something universal—it’s a theme that worries us as creators of this story, but there are so many other films that speak about it. It’s one of the biggest issues of our society, and it blends into political situations at a world level. That’s why this fable looks so dark.
Alberto Vázquez
