Review of Chico & Rita (2010) by Edith N — 11 Nov 2012

A Bad Time to End Up Stuck Back in Cuba.

Perhaps one of the things that pleased me most about this movie is that it is definitely not a kids' movie. I would say that the best reason for the movie to be animated is that it is probably the cheapest, easiest way to reconstruct things like pre-Revolution Cuba and Las Vegas of the 1950s. There's no reason essential to the story, but there is definitely an assist to the setting. While on the one hand, this is a simple love story, it is a love story that relies for its events on a changing world. The scope of New York as compared to Havana is essential for why certain of the characters behave the way they do. This puts the movie, alas, into what we call the "animation ghetto," that mindset that all animation is for kids regardless of whether that's appropriate to the movie or not. Honestly, I think most kids would be bored by most of the movie, and that's leaving out the scenes with sex and nudity.

Chico (Eman Xor Oña) is an old man in Havana, looking back on things that happened to him fifty years ago. He had been young and handsome and talented, the best pianist in Havana. One night, he is out with his best friend, Ramón (Mario Guerra), and a couple of American girls (except for the three leads and "Ron," everyone else is credited as "voice") at an outdoor club. Chico decides that the singer, Rita (Limara Meneses), is what he needs for his act, the thing that will let him make it. At first, she doesn't like him very much, but she falls for him despite the possessive Juana. Chico and Rita win a contest and get a contract at a local hotel, but after a fight, Rita ends up in New York without him. He follows her, but it doesn't seem as though they're meant to be together. She gets a solo career, including a movie, and he works for other people, including recording a ballad, "Lily," which sounds like a love song but is about someone's puppy. However, Chico and Rita still love each other, but life gets in their way.

One of the things I have always found depressing about ideological revolutions, such as the Cuban one we see here, is the determination to throw out the art that predates the revolution, or the art that they don't feel meets proper revolutionary standards. Chico is a talented pianist, but after Castro comes to power, his kind of music is no longer acceptable to those who make the decisions. It's decadent Western music, the music of the capitalist, imperialist oppressors. Never mind that Cuban music includes things like the rhythms of Africa. Never mind that essentially none of the great names in the style of music Chico plays are the kind of dreadful Yankees who go to watch it. (I found it interesting that all the Americans had dreadful accents--worse, even, than my own!) It's because the Yankees were the ones to patronize the clubs, I suppose, because the common people weren't allowed into the clubs. It's still a waste of art.

Rita also puts voice to a sad truth of the era. Several of the characters do, in fact. Oh, Rita is not at her best when she tells an entire audience about it, but the fact is, Las Vegas wasn't fully integrated until Sammy Davis, Jr., got his white friends to refuse to go into casinos that wouldn't let him in. Rita is a star, and she's drawing a lot of business into the hotel with her performance, but she isn't allowed to stay there; she has to cross the railroad tracks and stay in a hotel that allows blacks. And when she draws attention to that fact, that's it for her career. Wanting to stay in the hotel where she's a headliner makes her "controversial." For people like Chico and Rita, all the talent in the world didn't make up for the fact that they were dark-skinned. The Revolution didn't want their music, and the US didn't want their bodies. Their lives might have been easier if they hadn't made so much fuss with each other, but they never would have been easy.

I didn't always like the animation of this movie; the lips, in particular, were really jarring to me. However, I thought that moments showing the scenery were usually quite good, and I liked that the women were drawn in a variety of builds, many of which were as realistic as the art got in this movie. The music, of course, was very good indeed. There were several bits which probably made more sense to me, because of my knowledge of music history. (At one point, a character says that a piece was written for them by "some guy named Igor." Who has had a piece or two performed accompanied by animation before.) Neither Chico nor Rita were real people, but for all that, these were real lives. Heck, one of the main characters in the movie, Chano Pozo, was a real person who died approximately the way the character does--though of course Chico and Ramón were there, in the movie, and not in real life. This isn't a typical animated movie as Americans think of animation, but that may be all the more reason to watch it.