The Breadwinner (2017)
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The Breadwinner Movie Review
The Breadwinner is a 2017 animated drama film directed by Nora Twomey. It is a very strong, beautiful film that still could have been better.
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“Stories remain in our hearts even when all else is gone“
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It is set in Afghanistan which is controlled by Taliban. A young girl named Parvana must pretend to be a boy in order to get food and water for her family. The film portrayed realistically and seriously how harsh and unforgiving living as a woman in the Middle East truly is. It remains a heart-breaking issue for me and one that is seemingly not going to be resolved any time soon.
So in terms of storytelling, the film succeeds as this very serious, dark drama more for adults instead of children. I really liked its sense of realism and its eye-opening nature when it comes to this issue. It is very urgent in tone. However, I was still disappointed with its third act as it did not resolve enough and it felt like a half-baked conclusion to me. I wanted more thematic richness and sophistication in the film which is smart, but not as clever as it should have been.
The characterization is very good. Parvana is a pretty strong protagonist and she definitely reminds me of Mulan from the aforementioned film which is quite similar in its basic story. Shauzia is also excellent as her friend who also is pretending to be a boy. The two are definitely wonderful friends and I loved all of their scenes together. The other family members are also memorable and well utilized. Nurullah and Razaq are the likable highlights.
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The biggest problem of The Breadwinner lies in its voice acting which is simply mediocre I have to say. I don’t know how other critics did not pinpoint this major issue as the film is so obviously weakly acted. In my opinion it should have been done in Pashto language instead of English as the accents are not appealing at all. All of the actors and actresses here sound like amateurs and thus the emotion is not conveyed properly. It really bothered me.
The Breadwinner is gorgeously animated. It is a wonderful kind of simplistic, yet beautiful hand-drawn animation with somewhat typical character design, but excellent backgrounds and a lot of memorable imagery, especially of the town and some of the natural landscapes. The film has excellent attention to detail as it portrayed its setting stupendously well. I also really liked the animation in that story told throughout the whole movie.
That story is very good and I liked how it eventually revealed to us what happened to her brother Sulayman. It was a very interesting narrative and plot device, but I still found it too metaphorical and overdone as those scenes took too much of an already very short film.
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Nora Twomey is a force to be reckoned with after this film and ‘The Secret of Kells’. She directed this film superbly and her great work is felt throughout the whole production. The pacing is also pretty solid and I loved its score which was fittingly Arabic and quite memorable. Overall, it is certainly one of the best animated films of the year, but that doesn’t say much as 2017 is incredibly weak and this film disappointed me in the end.
The Breadwinner features gorgeous hand-drawn animation with some wonderful backgrounds and landscapes. The characterization is quite good and the overall story is moving, urgent in tone and quite powerful. The direction from Nora Twomey and the score are great as well. However, it did not reach greatness as it was seriously offset by its somewhat disappointing third act and annoyingly amateurish, mediocre voice acting.
