The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation

This animated film is absolutely wonderful. The drawings are really simple (it can't be compared to "Cars" or other "big" animated movies) but there's so much emotion and creativity that you go out of this film deeply moved and absolutely fascinated. It's the kind of film which makes you want to make animated films, thinking that it's something great and making you think something you didn't think before : animated films can be sometimes more powerful than any other films. The voice of John Turturro has something to do with it, both melancholic and angry. What really defines this film is "true feeling" and "simple". It's something very creative and new : the story told is a true story. Sometimes, true photos or newspapers are put into the film. It creates a wonderful mix between the reality and the dream, a true person and his image and for the director, between the desire of rediscovering his childhood and the fear about it. It's very sad as the father died before the film was made and it's strange what someone who didn't talk can say to his child and how love can impersonate itself in our lives and stories.

There are a number of folks who think baring their all emotionally must, somehow, equal ART. This movie lies there as the definitive proof that that is not the case; despite how many idiots are praising it for its "honesty."

It is, instead, brilliantly dishonest. The filmmaker has issues with his daddy. After apparently never having confronted his father about the things that bothered him while he was alive, the filmmaker decided to make up a conversation with his dad into which he, the filmmaker, would put words into his dead father's mouth, making it clear it was all his fault.

The film comes across as whiny and nasty, a post-death "f*** you" to his old man.

There is no imagination, style or talent for imagery revealed in the pedestrian animation with which he illustrates all this.

Watching it is like watching a child throw a particularly nasty childhood tantrum, and that is all I can remember of this self-absorbed film.

A deeply personal response to the filmmaker's relationship with his father using photos, animation, home movies and characterized narration. It revolves around a moot interview that Canemaker has with his dead father. There are some interesting surprises. A blend of points through reflection, recounting, imagined responses and opinion all of which to build a story regarding a son's frustration with knowing little of his father's past and which questions why his father tore strips off him as a kid. Much of the animation is raw and free flowing. Worth watching if you are interested in animated documentaries and the issues it covers. It's quite bleak, but not absent of humour and charm.

"The Moon and the Son" was the most breathtaking animated film I have ever seen. This was due to it's truthful content. A simple imagined conversation between a man and his deceased father gives insights to the man's need for understanding as well as the understanding that is unveiled. This story is brilliantly told and illustrated. I would highly recommend people to watch this gem. It touched my heart. I laughed. I cried. I personalized. And it made me think. The odyssey of a persons search for heritage, love, acceptance, understanding, empathy is all encompassing. This short is masterful in it's simplicity. It will touch your heart and possibly open it and expand it, too. Two thumbs way up!

"The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation" is like a visit to Oprah's couch for dysfunctional families crossed with "The Sopranos" and PBS's "American Experience" but through magical animation.

Director/co-writer John Canemaker tells a presumably autobiographical story that makes Noah Brumbach look like he was too easy on his father in "The Squid and the Whale." It brings genealogy to life in a uniquely beautiful way.

Canemaker uses a dazzling array of animation styles and techniques, from black and white photographs to colorful childish drawings and much, much more, to tell the raw story of his bullying Italian immigrant father and his fraught relationship with him. He is like a wizard calling forth all the considerable creative talents at his command to not just recreate the vanished world of his and father's pasts but to try to effect an impossible reconciliation. It's like he is clenching and unclenching his fists throughout the film. While Faulkner-like the past is never past, he goes to extraordinary visual lengths to try and understand how he and his father became the men they are and were.

I can't think of any animated short I've seen before where I was so more emotionally involved in the story than in the images. As narrators, John Turturro as The Son and Eli Wallach as The Father (with the non-Anglicized version of the director's last name) eerily capture a tale that swings from light-hearted to horrific, sweet to scary, angry to sympathetic. It is a very unusual perspective on The American Dream across all of the 20th century as it swings back and forth from bitter and cynical to loving and almost forgiving.

The film incidentally illustrates an aspect of Italian immigration that has been documented by historians, such as Mark Wyman's "Round Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930" and Betty Boyd Caroli's "Italian Repatriation from the United States, 1900-1914" but not generally in popular culture.

This film was viewed as part of a commercial screening of Oscar nominated shorts.