The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation

John Canemaker's Academy Award-winning gritty look at his father starts out soft but quickly gets rough. "The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation" features John Turturro as the son and Eli Wallach as the dad. It's not anything great, but it's not one that you'll forget easily. It might be of interest to people who want to watch every Oscar-winning documentary, but not to most people.

"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!

Add my voice to those who are underwhelmed with this Oscar winning short. This is the personal story of filmmaker John Canemaker attempting to come to terms with his deceased father. Using a variety of animation techniques, home movies and photos Camemaker imagines a conversation between himself and his father. What were his father's secrets and why did his Dad do the things he did? Canemaker takes a stab at trying to work out things, but because the answers were never revealed in life the answers revealed here seem some how more wishful thinking than anything else. Its not bad but it never really seemed to amount to much. The problem with the film for me was that the material seems to be almost too personal, it never transcended into a universalness that great stories do. Its not bad, really, its not, its not great, certainly not best of the year (Bill Plymton's Fan and the Flower is infinitely better as are the other Oscar nominated shorts).

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: 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.