Boy
Boy tells the story of an 11-year-old growing up in rural 1980s New Zealand amid harsh circumstances. His mother died giving birth to his younger brother, who remains haunted by guilt. His father is a deadbeat wanderer who goes missing for years at a time. His best friend is literally a goat. And when his grandmother is called away to a distant funeral, he's left in charge of a bustling household of cousins young enough to need diapers (plus food and shelter). But out of this grim Kiwi spin on Home Alone, Boy explodes in a hundred directions that are the opposite of grim. "Welcome to my interesting world," says Boy, introducing the film's kid's-eye view while communicating our narrator's inherent innocence. Unlike the viewer, our hero lacks the life experience to recognize his circumstances as harsh—this is simply his life, and he offers it up to us as innocently as an 11-year-old would, using the tools at an 11-year-old's disposal: cartoonish fantasies, scratchy illustrations, cut-and-paste collages, and charmingly simplistic explanations. Boy is a candy-colored crowd-pleaser packed with deep, dark substance, and it's just about perfect.
by David Schmader