Aniki Bóbó

Aniki-Bóbó (1942) is a film from the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, who reached a hundred years this year. It's the oldest director in activity.

This film is based on the story «Millionaire Boys», from a Portuguese writer, Rodrigues de Freitas.

It's a story about children, as an embryo from adult, whose both qualities and defects are revealed for us but in a simple form that all of people easily understand.

The name of the film went from a children game, a pun which form a balderdash, and they play that in the movie, «Aniki-Bébé, Aniki-Bóbó, passarinho tótó, berimbau, cavaquinho, Salomão, sacristão, tu és polícia, tu és ladrão». In Portuguese it makes any sense too, but it is the sound from this play of words that counts. In English it would be «Aniki-Baby, Aniki-Bóbó, goofy birdie, berimbau (a musical instrument), Solomon, sacristan, you are police, you are thief».

It was a anticipation from the Italian Neo-Realism and it had influences from the German Expressionism that Oliveira had seen in a Murnau movie, «Sunrise, a song of two humans» (1927). Oliveira travelled a lot in this period because he was a pilot in car racers, he practised Athletics and he was a trapeze artist, and, for this motifs, he had contact with many countries and movie exhibitions.

Fernando Pessoa, one of the greatest world poets, which happened to be portuguese, as the director of Aniki Bobó once said something like "No children's book should be written for children". I apply this to cinema. There's no sense in making children's movies completely empty of any idea, as hollywood loves to do them (maybe because noone there can make them another way). For those who never saw Aniki Bobó I will say this movie is the cinematic equivalent of Éxupery's "The Prince". A poetic tale for children, absolutely breathtaking in terms of the dramatic intensity created around such a simple story; but, at the same time, a deep reflexion on the theme of human behaviours and conscience. Its characters portrait innocence, vain, envy, generosity and the consequences of all that. (This movie also reminds a soviet old short movie, which tells Romeo and Juliet incarnated into two school children, but I'm afraid I forgot the name of the director and of the movie; if you have any idea of what film that might be, it would be nice to tell me, please). But apart from the second senses of all the movie, it should also be apreciated for it portraits Porto's society and way of living of that time as well as the city's physical appearance, which makes this movie, along with "Porto, faina fluvial", from the same director, and a few others from other people, a vital document for the city's history. An all time classic which should be better known, for the sake of the cinema.

A movie about children and their simple expectations. A pure, ingenious film, that should be viewed by everyone who wishes to go back to those wonderful early years. In the beginning of his career, Oliveira shows an intelligent, sensitive, real world history in a true cinema pearl.

Even today, when you visit the river margins of Porto and Gaia, looking at the rabelo boats (that used to carry the Port Wine from up-river), the iron bridges built by Eiffel and his pupils, and you sense Porto has been remade as a city for tourists, you can still sense Porto is, and was, the Portuguese "working capital", as represented in the magnificent movie Aniki Bobó, a sunny city of honest workers, kids playing happily and careless in the streets, old streets of stone and green... Aniki Bobó is a trip to a Porto that disappeared (most of the town depicted in the movie is now ruins), but still lives, through the lives and dreams of kids. Immortal.

A gang of youngsters run around the streets of Lisbon, playing, fighting and getting into trouble.

Manoel de Oliveira's first feature film is the Portuguese equivalent of an 'Our Gang' movie done right.The kids want what kids want, they put up with the incomprehensible and absolute authority of adults when they have to, and get away with what they can when the big folks aren't looking. They have their own mythology and pecking order, and Horácio Silva, as a typical kid, wants just to be accepted as part of the group. It's a truly charming movie. And de Oliveira didn't make another film for fifteen years. He said Salazar's government wouldn't let him, and given the fact that as of his death in 2015 at the age of 106, who was there to contradict him?