The Breadwinner

The animation style from Cartoon Saloon Studios is quite particular and unique, relying on traditional hand-drawing animation, with characters with big eyes that lack a big deal of detail, almost geometrical. But there's also a few characteristics in their narratives that are very distinctive, specially the traditional folk stories that find a way into the real world and open the eyes of children to the beautiful history and mythologies of their cultural group.

Their biggest past successes, The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, brought to life the beautiful legends and folk ancient tales from Ireland, the home country of directors Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey (Moore's new film will also be set in Ireland), but for Twomey's first solo film as a director, she decided to take the same qualities from their previous works to tell a powerful story about war and growing a woman in the Middle East.

The Breadwinner is above all, a healing film; one that goes to old stories as a way to make peace with the wounds of the present and the past. But it is also an inspiring film, one that confronts the misogyny and the fundamentalism, and through their main character, a young Afghani girl who disguises herself as a boy in order to provide for her family, they show the pride that can't be taken from oneself, even in the most adversing situations.

A film that deals with kid's transvestism is, by force, a film that deals with the construction of gender identities, but unlike most films of those films, The Breadwinner has little or nothing to do with queer theory. This cross-dressing is more a matter of necessity rather than personal exploration, so when Parvana is seen as a boy, she is able to experiment the world in a completely different way, one that has huge more advantages for men than for women, for the first time, she's not seen as the property of her father, but as a human being in her own right.

It is through a story that she is telling her baby brother, that Parvana will find courage to confront the oppressive system that is choking her. Twomey makes a fantastic work contrasting the animations between Parvana's world and her fictional story, using a very different animation style, that more than cartoons look like puppetry, but that is as rich and delightful to see as the rest of the film. She also has a good sense of rhythm and shows an entire control of a film that goes from light-hearted fun moments to heart-breaking ones. The Breadwinner is a pacifist and feminist film that never aims at moralizing, but instead, show us a human story that grows and evolves, enveloped in beautiful hand-crafted animation, and gives us inspiration, through the strong girl they have as lead character, to keep fighting for freedom against bigotry, fascism and repression.