Parvana, une enfance en Afghanistan

This movie gets a perfect score for me, but it's not for everyone.

Recently I saw many movies and even animated movies. But they were all made to impress in cheap ways such as huge stakes, awesome CGI and well known actors. The Breadwinner for me does so much more with so much less.

This movie however is about characters you wouldn't normally care about. About a story so far from your living room that you wont bother to check. And yet, this is why it touched me. It's a realistic take of a distant world. The characters and situations are as down to earth as possible, even compared to live action movies. The soul this movie has, with the small stakes of a poor family and even how a girl copes with the loss of her brother, is what most directors and writers fail to deliver. The movie gives many cultural elements of how an Afgan family lives, how men differ from women and how the whole city works.

I had to check and see if everything depicted in the movie was real in some way. This was a fictional story but so well crafted that left me stunned. I thought it could be a biography like the 10 year old cartoon movie Persepolis (which has similar style and setting) but it's not.

The description of this movie "an 11-year-old girl who cuts off her hair and dresses like a boy to support her family", put me off at first because it reminded me of Mulan. This may not be a blockbuster but it is a superior film made by a smaller company.

It was good. Powerful film. As a writer, and a lover of a good story, this was a good story. A glimpse into the look of lives, human lives, that many seem to forget about whenever speaking about the middle east. It reminds me of a more, hopeful version of Grave of the fireflies. Again, a lot more hopeful, but no less powerful. Especially the ending. Worth watching.

From the creators of The Secret of Kells & Song of the Sea comes an unexpectedly bleak, depressing & powerfully evocative story that's crafted with the same passion, devotion & intimacy as their previous efforts, and paints a dark, disturbing & daring portrait of life under the regime of terror. Arresting, enchanting & thoroughly captivating, The Breadwinner is another winning feature from Cartoon Saloon that not only establishes them as a strong creative force but also catapults them into the same league as Pixar, Laika & Studio Ghibli.

This was a unique and very different kind of movie. It's not likely that an animated movie would be set in war-torn Afghanistan. But this one was. And it _felt_ very authentic. I'm no authority on whether it was authentic or not, but it's the attention to detail that lends to the feeling of authenticity. Details about life, the clothing, the accents, the marketplaces, the politics, the culture, etc., add to the richness of the movie.

It's an animated movie. So of course you expect it to all end well at the end. But as you near the ending, you start to wonder how could it possibly end up all well. And then you get to the ending. And then, I don't know. Of course, I won't spoil it. But the ending was not a conventional ending. It wasn't a sad ending; it wasn't a happy ending. I guess it was an ambiguous ending. And even though it leaves me without a fully satisfying ending, the journey it took me on was fantastic!

Cartoon Saloon shows us a moving story in Afghanistan; the plot is good, the characters are charismatic, the animation is excellent and the soundtrack is very good; I highly recommend it.