Tito and the Birds.

The Brazilian film Tito and the Birds (original title Tito e os Pássaros) was one of 25 animated titles eligible for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film, just now getting a release to U.S. theaters in both subtitled and English dubbed versions. It’s a visual feast with a story that is modern in details, classic in theme, and hews closely to the story templates of most animated films that try to appeal simultaneously to adult audiences and to most kids. It’s dark for its genre, but full of hope, with kids as its heroes and a simple message, cogently delivered, en route to a spectacular ending. (I saw the subtitled version.)

This year will mark the 19th time the Academy has given out a Best Animated Feature Film prize, with the number of nominees in each year tied to the number of eligible films – if fewer than 16 films are eligible, three earn nominations; otherwise, five get nods. The history of the award shows three strong biases: The Academy loves major studio releases, they prefer computer-animated films, and they strongly favor English-language films. Only one animated film that wasn’t originally written in English has won the honor (Hiyao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away won in 2002, the second year of the award); there have never been more than two nominees in languages other than English, with that last occurring in 2013 (Ernest & Celestine, which is wonderful, and Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises). The last film that wasn’t computer-animated to win was the Wallace and Gromit feature in 2005. This year’s slate of five includes two Disney/Pixar titles and one Sony Animation title, plus one co-produced by Fox Animation and Europe’s enormous Studio Babelsberg. With Mirai, a Japanese feature that wasn’t from Miyazaki or his Studio Ghibli, taking the fifth spot, the odds were stacked against Tito from the start – and then you add that the writers and directors were themselves first-timers and I don’t think this ever had a shot at a nomination. So with all of that prologue, and recognizing this hill points almost straight up, I’ll give my opinion: If Tito and the Birds wasn’t the best animated film of 2018, it was damn close, and its exclusion would be an embarrassment if the Academy were capable of that sentiment.

Tito takes place in a slightly altered version of the present, as a new pandemic begins around a disease of fear. Doctors don’t know what causes it or how it spreads, but it causes people to shrivel into shapeless blobs and, in its final and incurable stage, into rocks. The answer to the riddle of the disease seems to lie with the birds, which is where Tito and his scientist father Dr. Rufus come in; Dr. Rufus has been trying for years to build a machine to allow us to understand the language of birds, in part because he believes they are trying to warn humanity of some impending catastrophe. The machine fails and Dr. Rufus goes into exile, which leaves Tito and his friends Sarah, Buiú, and the wealthy scion Teo to try to rebuild the machine and stop the epidemic, even as Teo’s father Alaor, the film’s main antagonist, tries to stoke the fears through his television shows so he can sell real estate in his new, walled-off Dome Gardens.

Alaor is Trump, obviously – the pre-election Trump, using his platform as a reality TV celebrity to stoke fear for his own financial benefit, ignorant of or simply unsympathetic to the damage he might be wreaking on society as a whole. The disease vector is never identified in the film – this is a fear disease of fear itself, which means that Alaor can accelerate its spread by reminding people of all of the dangers in the world, foremost among which is other people. The epidemic rages as the kids work together against the city’s Gestapo-like biohazard agents and race to rebuild Dr. Rufus’ machine, failing one time after another as the disease even threatens to overtake each of them. The conclusion wasn’t what I expected – the writers had an easy way to wrap up the story, but took the long way round, and it works quite beautifully on both literal and metaphorical levels. The scripts speaks to how society should confront its fears, such as the rampant xenophobia that has infected our national dialogue, but also has a message that should resonate with anyone who’s had to cope with individual fears or anxiety.

The visuals here match up to the quality of the story, with an oil-painted look to the backgrounds that balances between impressionist and post-impressionist painting styles, including land and seascapes that reminded me of last year’s Loving Vincent, which took actual Van Gogh paintings and used them as backdrops for the entire movie. In our era of hyperrealistic computer animation, there’s a nostalgic pleasure in the exaggerated, inexact depictions of the characters themselves – Buiú in particular is my favorite, and the way he’s drawn reminded me of Jason from Home Movies. Their slapdash look contrasts well with the bold colors and huge strokes of the backgrounds when the characters are outside, complemented by the small elements on screen when the characters are indoors (e.g., the blue flame under a tea kettle).

That combination of a great story with strong animation feels like such a throwback, especially since computer-animated films dominate the box office as well as the awards in the category. (The Annie Awards split their Best Feature category in 2015, adding a category for independent animated features, and Tito and the Birds earned a nomination there, losing to Mirai.) It’s probably a matter of personal taste, but this kind of animation feels both nostalgic and yet still fresh, because there can always be something new when pen meets paper. For a film that began life as a script in 2011 and was finished in 2016-17, Tito and the Birds feels like it could have been finished yesterday, yet will remain relevant for a generation to come.