Boy & the World · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A boy stands on a white page. He is a circle, two dots, a line, a striped shirt. No ground under him, no horizon behind him. A train comes through, takes his father toward the city, and leaves the page as empty as it was.

Almost any other animated feature would fill that space. Rendering is what the money buys. Abreu leaves it blank, and the blankness is the first thing worth learning to read.

Deleuze has a name for space that has stopped functioning as a setting for action: espace quelconque, the any-space-whatever. He found it in postwar European cinema, in bombed lots and hotel corridors that no longer tell a character what to do there. Abreu's version is untouched paper. It isn't a shortcut and it isn't the budget showing through. It's a position, the one Glauber Rocha staked out when he argued that a poor cinema should convert its scarcity into form rather than conceal it. In drawing, every blank is chosen. White here means: this part of the world has not yet been ruled and gridded, and the boy is still allowed to be small inside it.

Then he follows his father. That is where an ordinary film would begin.

Deleuze's name for the cinema that runs from Griffith through the studio system is the movement-image, and its engine is a circuit. A character perceives a situation, feels something about it, acts, and the situation changes. Quest, obstacle, resolution. Boy & the World opens that circuit and never closes it. The boy walks the length of a commodity chain, cotton field to mill to port to metropolis, and alters nothing at any stage. There is no antagonist with intentions, no bargain, no reversal produced by anyone's choice. The father cannot be found because the father has been absorbed into the machinery the boy is walking through. Deleuze called this figure the voyant, the seer: a character who can only look and endure. He called the journey that changes nothing the balade, the stroll — the form that replaced the quest once filmmakers stopped believing action could fix a situation.

That lens pays for itself immediately. Without it you have a sad children's road movie whose hero fails. With it you have the film's actual argument: the boy's powerlessness is not a weakness in the script, it is the content. Abreu's own account backs this up. He began with research into Latin American extraction economies, coups, dependency, and stalled under the weight of it until a notebook sketch of a small boy showed him the whole history could ride on a child's perception. That substitution is his invention, and it's exact. Everything that would have been exposition became image. A child was the right instrument because a child has not yet learned to find the system normal.

Since the boy has almost no face, the feeling has to live somewhere else, and it lives in color. Deleuze describes an affective color that absorbs a whole scene into a single quality instead of describing objects in it. Abreu runs his moral scheme chromatically and without exception: the village and the natural world in wobbling hand-drawn line and saturated primaries, the industrial order in ruled grids and desaturated gray. Bound to that is a three-note phrase belonging to the father, which the boy carries like a possession you can fit in a pocket. Lose it, corrupt it, recover it, and the page's color goes with it. The film's emotional architecture is a melody and its saturation level.

The workers arrive as a mass. Sorted at a gate, the accepted sent through, the rejected simply discarded. Deleuze's term for a crowd rendered as one affective unit rather than a set of individuals is the dividual, and the debt here is to Lang's Metropolis, whose shift-change files feed an animate machine. Lang gives you awe at the scale. Abreu gives you the arithmetic of sorting, which is worse. And his machines are drawn as insects: segmented, many-legged, exhaling. That's what Deleuze called an originary world, the naturalist intuition that beneath the ordinary social surface lies a world of pure appetite. Industry appears as infestation rather than construction, and the drawing establishes this before a single event occurs.

When the conflict finally becomes visible, it can't be fought, so it gets figured instead. An enormous plumed bird of many colors against a black armored one. Deleuze's attraction-image, inherited from Eisenstein: action transposed into spectacle because the character has no way to take it. Plural popular culture against monocultural force, legible on contact, and no one in the film lifts a finger.

Nobody in the film says anything, either. The invented tongue is Portuguese recorded and reversed, so speech keeps its cadence, warmth and emotional contour while losing all semantic content. This turns the whole film into what Deleuze called a lectosign: an image that no longer reads automatically and has to be deciphered. Once dialogue can't tell you anything, the drawing becomes the text. Curve versus ruler is the sentence.

Then the fable breaks. Live-action documentary footage drops into the drawn world: clear-cut forest, plant, smoke, machinery. The seam is not hidden. This is Deleuze's interstice, the irrational cut, which joins two images across a gap instead of by continuity — an AND rather than a because. Critics split on it, and the objection is fair: after eighty minutes of trusting metaphor, the film states its case outright. But the gap is doing the work. Drawing and photograph do not belong to the same order of image, and Abreu refuses to translate one into the other. It's the moment the fable admits it has a referent, and it leaves you to hold both.

The close folds the film back on its opening. The old man returns, and boy, father and old man settle into one life seen at three points. This is not a flashback, which would date the past and file it. Deleuze's peaks of present describes something stranger: incompatible presents coexisting in the same film. The boy's future is the ruined old age he already met in the first reel. Abreu withholds the connective tissue that would make this a twist, so it lands as recognition, and the film flips from lament about the past into warning about the present.

Behind all of it sits the tradition Deleuze called minor or political cinema, where the filmmaker finds no unified people to speak for and has to invent one. He called that inventing fabulation: storytelling as a political act, a people caught in the act of legending itself. Abreu invents a language, a bird, and a graphic idiom borrowed from cordel woodcut pamphlets, the same cheap popular print Rocha used in Black God, White Devil to organize national history as folk ballad. Andean flute quietly widens Brazil into a continent. Emicida's entrance drops actual contemporary São Paulo into the invented one. And the drawing is always doing two jobs at once, the boy's perception and Abreu's research on dependency economics inseparable in the same crayon line, which is Deleuze's free indirect vision: the author sees through the character without either one silencing the other.

The craft debts are specific. Modern Times is the model for the mill: a body threaded through cogwheels in flat lateral framing, gesture and machine rhythm carrying every bit of the exposition. Norman McLaren's Begone Dull Care is behind the harvest and port montages, where shape and stain are cut to Feffer and Kurlat's percussion instead of to story beats. Yellow Submarine licensed the medium-switching inside a single shot. And Macunaíma supplies the deepest move, Oswald de Andrade's antropofagia: swallow the foreign form, European modernist drawing included, and spit it back in a Brazilian register.

What it did to the art is simple to state. Feature animation is structurally an argument that expressiveness costs money — pipelines, departments, years of overhead. Abreu made his film in a studio rather than a factory, with a crew small enough that individual hands stay visible in the frame, and put it on the Academy ballot beside Inside Out. It stands as proof that a feature can drop dialogue, consistent rendering and narrative causality and still hold a general audience, and independent animators have been drawing on that permission since.

Watch the white next time. Notice how much of it there is before the descent into the city, and how the crowding when depth finally arrives reads as an assault. And when the old man turns up at the end, ask yourself which of the three you have been watching all along. The film won't tell you, and that refusal is the most generous thing in it.