L'arte della felicità

Waking Life meets Alois Nebel but without the rotoscoping. This melancholic portrait of an ex-musician that became a taxi driver, is a beautifully drawn animated film with lots of dialogue about life, love and loss. With some minor contemporary criticisms and lots of religious contemplations, L'arte della felicità knows how to captivate its audiences, provoke some thoughts and, most of all, create a gloomy yet meditative atmosphere. This might be one of those films that grows on you after seeing it. Rewatching it later in life might have another effect exactly because of that. Time will tell. Nevertheless, since this picture resembles one of my favorite movies of all time (Waking Life), it was bound to be compared to that and, of course, it isn't as good. Some of the storyline in L'arte della felicità is quite boring, which slows the experience down a bit. Nonetheless a very good and partly successful attempt of bringing something interesting on the (animated) screen. Nicely done!

L'arte della felicità, directed by Alessandro Rak is a visionary animated film of deep play that is stylistically innovative and spiritually/philosophically rich in content.

The plot is really summarized in a few word as it weaves the embittered middle-aged taxi driver, the once brilliant pianist Sergio, forcing him to reconsider life. He begins to make strange encounters recalling his journey with his deceased brother and listening to the words of a radio program called The Art of Happiness.

In terms of content L'arte della felicità isn't just a hodgepodge of dialogue driven piece, its visuals are interesting and add to the experience. The dream state of the movie allows for the animation to take on a fresh approach to convey the ideas. The film, which is composed of a different philosophical inquiry touches on many topics such as freedom, regrets, dream, politics, existentialism. It is a really heavy film at times, almost always of a philosophical as all the characters have their opinion to say on the topic in question.