Birdboy: The Forgotten Children

An island. Years ago there was an explosion at the factory and everything was poisoned; the soil is dead, the sea is filthy, and the adults are either addicted or helpless. A young mouse called Dinky plans to escape with two friends. Birdboy lives alone in the forest, the police are after him, and what he is holding inside keeps growing. Alberto Vázquez and Pedro Rivero direct, from Vázquez's own graphic novel. The distance between the drawing and the content is the film's principal instrument. The characters are round, appealing and look like a children's book; what they are describing is addiction, poverty, suicide and ecological catastrophe. The island is built as a figure and attaches directly to the Spanish economic crisis after 2008: the closed factory, the families out of work, the young who want to leave. The narrative carries several strands and they do not all arrive in the same place; some passages stand as entirely separate short stories. It won the Goya for best animation in 2016 and became one of the frequently cited examples of European animation made for adults. Who it is for: viewers who like adult animation and dark allegory. Who it is not for: it is absolutely unsuitable for children, the subjects are very heavy, and it ends without offering hope.