Review of Chico & Rita (2010) by Walter M — 13 Mar 2012

Chico is currently an old man living in Havana. One day, he hears a song that he wrote fifty years before and is transported back to 1948 when he and his friend Ramon were out clubbing with two American women. But Chico has eyes for no one but Rita, a shapely singer, who hardly gives him the time of day and leaves with an American date with Chico sadly not getting any closer to knowing her any better. But Ramon helps find her at the Tropicana, the hottest nightclub in town and then Chico and Rita finally hit it off. But not before a close escape from the American paramour, thus allowing Chico and Rita to make beautiful music that night while Ramon gets to spend the night with the American women.

"Chico and Rita" is an exuberant and bittersweet animated film that is both nostalgic and anti-nostalgic. For the first, it satisfies the viewer's need for hand drawn animation to expressionistically recapture a lost world of great music and artists, including a few cameos and apparently one true life incident thrown in, centered around a tempestuous love affair that both inflames and inspires. Along these same lines, this world is not as pretty as memory recalls, which the straight lines of computer animation could not capture, with the subjects of racism and questions about whether Cuba is better off after the revolution coming to light.