Arrugas

A Spanish animated drama telling the story of Emilio, a retired bank manager who is developing early signs of Alzheimer. His son makes the difficult decision to put him in a care home, much to his father's disappointment. There, he slowly strikes up a friendship with his roommate Miguel who has all his marbles and spends his time making money out of his confused neighbours. The two find ways of relieving the boredom of the home but Emilio is seemingly fighting a losing battle as his memory begins to fade.

I thought this was an interesting little drama with a balanced mix of pathos and humour. For someone who works with older people, often in a care capacity, much of this rang true with me, particularly the boredom and loneliness that many experience when they move into a home. It never threatens to be anything truly groundbreaking and the animation is pretty basic but nonetheless it is a worthy film with some lovely scenes and will strike a chord with anyone who has had to deal with this terrible disease.

Basically it's a movie about the rather harsh and brisk final period of lucidity for a man (Antonio) sent into an elder care home after being a burden to his family for a long time.

Although there's really not much light at the end of the tunnel, and although the subject matter is not very pleasant, it somehow manages to be a comedy, and not a black comedy. Rather it has its pleasant comedic and happy moments, much like reflections of the elderly residents of this home. Things go from bad to worse, but that doesn't mean there weren't a few laughs and rays of joy along the way.

Much of the comedy comes from Miguel, an Argentine who serves as a sort of older and less mobile version of McMurphy from Cuckoo's nest. He's tricky and vulgar, like some sort of street-smart comedic relief. He dreams of greater things and talks a big game; with revolutionary zeal he utters truths about the system and how sordid it is. Yet at the end of the day he's still frail and stiff and can't do much at all other than grumble wistfully.

Miguel ends up coming to certain realisations. Antonio does not.

The characters are compelling and the scenes are effectively sometimes sad, sometimes funny, sometimes touching. It's a film that holds your attention from beginning to end, effectively considers a social problem, and comes to the sober conclusion that all that one can do is come to terms with it.

Perhaps the only weaknesses are that sometimes the audio is not well done, with the characters talking over each other and Miguel's transformation is a little rushed. Still, one of the heavy hitters among animated movies.

Probably my favourite acknowledgements page of any book or movie, too: "For the elders of today and the elders of tomorrow."

Honourable Mentions: The Thing (1982): "why don't we just sit here for a while and see what happens?" No two ways about it, and it's really the same for everyone - at some point the only thing that one will be able to do is to accept that the end has arrived.

A beautifully told and scenically depicted tale of friendship, love, cynicism, disappointment and hope in the twilight years. It's a pleasant departure from the Disney-Pixar brand of animated movies, and hits the right notes with realistic problems, real-life humor and eccentric characters.

If you rate a good movie as one which can make you feel a range of emotions, from sympathy, happiness, sadness, to thrill of adventure, hope and that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you see a P&G ad, this movie is sure to delight and stay with you for a reasonably long time.

It does get slow in bits. You go through topsy turvy emotions with Emilio and Miguel's friendship and quirkiness along the way. There's Antonia and other characters to lend life to the gloominess of a general old age home. But what you can never guess, is the heart warming end to this beautifully crafted movie.

Worth a watch. Go see it now.

NOTE: This is a review of the English-dubbed version of Wrinkles, featuring voice actors Martin Sheen and Matthew Modine.

"Poignant" is the word many are using to describe Wrinkles, and that word carries a great deal of weight here, since many of us will likely face a similar reality to the characters in this particular film. Getting older, coping with age, and facing life-threatening/altering ailments isn't something we generally like to talk about, which is why Wrinkles presents it to us through beautifully simplistic, 2D animation created through use of an animation cell. The film's brightly colored visuals and clean-cut presentation make us look at age not through a softened lens, but one that allows us not to get blinded through our tears to actually focus on the bigger picture.

Our main character is Emilio (voiced by Martin Sheen), a once thriving banker who has now been placed in a nursing home by his family when he becomes slower than he used to be. Emilio also seems to be in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and reluctantly goes along with his family's plan to keep him in a care facility until further notice. Not long after arriving, Emilio meets Miguel (Matthew Modine), his roommate and the home's two-bit slickster, constantly taking money from the older, senile residents and remaining loyal to his individual self since he never had a wife or any real family. Miguel takes a liking to Emilio and his former banker ways, even going as far as referring to him as "Rockefeller," and showing him the ropes of the facility.

Miguel introduces Emilio to all the residents of the home, including Antonia, an elderly woman who collects the tea, cream, sugar, and cracker packets liberally given out at lunch and dinnertime (surely you have grandparents like this), Felix, a former radio-broadcaster who now simply parrots what others around him say, the long-suffering Dolores, who resides at the home solely to care for her husband in his advanced stages of Alzheimer's, and a woman who sits by a window all day long, believing she's riding the Orient Express.

Miguel explains to Emilio how these places cater to potential clients and family members more than they do the actual elderly clients they're responsible for. This idea comes up when Emilio takes note of a beautiful, but untouched, swimming pool in the nursing home's lobby, where Miguel states it's there simply to look nice for family members who believe their relatives are being cared for and catered to at this place. His ideas almost mirror that of Philip Seymour Hoffman's character in The Savages, only expressed with much less hostility. Where Hoffman asserted these meticulously trimmed hedges, pervasively waxed floors, and neatly tidied and organized rooms were mere distractions of the fact that nursing homes are where people age, get sick, and die, Miguel seems to accept the hierarchy as a cruel rite of passage that cannot be overturned.

Wrinkles, however, doesn't spend too long criticizing the nursing home system. It spends more time exploring the characters at hand. Its simplistic, but pleasantly unique, 2D animation prevents things like spectacles from taking over, and instead, shows facial expressions and character/facial features. This emphasis makes the film a film of refined detail, and the fact that it's situated on characters instead of constantly conjuring up events makes this a very mannered exercise in age.

Most of Wrinkles is Emilio and Miguel roaming the nursing home, talking, Emilio's condition gradually worsening, and interactions with other inmates. A lesser film would've evoked some kind of incredulous plot to have the two geezers try and score a piece of tail from one of the nurses (thankfully, time spent doing that is instead traded for harmless observing). Rarely are animated films this loose and fluid; most are rooted in momentary gratification, constantly looking for ways for their characters to exploit every ounce of energy they've come equipped with. Wrinkles contributes to the animation for adults genre, a genre which greatly lacks a lot of attention and a lot of good, known options. It's a thoroughly tender film as heartwarming as its characters can be, and a look inside the realities of aging without the sugarcoating or the half-handed depictions. It's further proof that sometimes one of the softest presentations in film can back the hardest, most impacting punch (see My Dog Tulip for further confirmation).

Voiced by: Martin Sheen and Matthew Modine. Directed by: Ignacio Ferreras.

Because it really shows the problem with the elderly and shows what it's like with a man or anyone with Alzheimer's and living in a retirement home. Friendship can change the View on a man who believed that you live your whole life and That's How It Ends. And it looked so it shows the lives of old people of today and old people of tomorrow. I like this movie and I like how it shows what for dedication to this movie that's why I give an 8 out of 10.