Plenty of love in McGrath’s ‘Boss Baby’ – Tale of Brazil slum orchestra has audiences in tears

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Actress Claire Danes addresses the audience at the Women in Film 2016 Crystal + Lucy Awards at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP)
Actress Claire Danes addresses the audience at the Women in Film 2016 Crystal + Lucy Awards at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP)

LOS ANGELES, June 17, (Agencies): For years, CG animation has driven to emulate reality. Technological standards are now so high, however, that animation can now begin to emulate art, even the squash and stretch comedy of hand-drawn classics.

One result: DreamWorks Animation’s “The Boss Baby,” starring Alec Baldwin, Steve Buscemi, Jimmy Kimmel and Lisa Kudrow, set for a March 2017 release via 20th Century Fox. Directed by Tom McGrath, helmer of the “Madagascar” movies and “Mastermind,” “Boss Baby” had an Annecy audience in stitches at a June 16 sneak preview which unveiled a clutch of never-seen-before sequences to a privileged audience including Guillermo del Toro.

McGrath’s peformance-led comedy style goes with his territory. He watched “Bugs Bunny” with his dad on Saturday mornings. “I laughed at the slapstick, my father at the dialogue,” he recalled, presenting “The Boss Baby” to an Annecy Fest audience. He graduated from the character animation program at Cal Arts. At the time, the old Disney animators, such as Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, as well as Chuck Jones, were still teaching there.

“Now we’re kind of going back to our roots in animation and looking to the past to move forward,” McGrath said. “’Boss Baby’ is very much a cartoony sensibility. There’s a lot of squash and stretch. In “Madagascar,” while many animators on other films were emulating live action, pushing for realistic lighting and textures, “we really wanted to do something cartoony, but the technology wasn’t quite there. Rigs broke if squished too much.

“But as we progressed the technology got better, and what was a lost art became hip again, McGrath added, citing Genndy “Hotel Transylvania” and Doug Sweetland’s “Presto”.

“’Boss Baby’ is the first film where I could capture things that 2D was able to capture sixty years ago,” he enthused.

That was seen in the sequences McGrath unveiled at Annecy. Written by Michael McCullers, “Boss Baby” is narrated from the POV and imagination of a seven-year-old kid, Tim, who gets a baby brother.

Applause

In a first sequence shown at Annecy, which McGrath screened to whoops of applause, Tim happens upon baby brother in his cradle, in a executive suit, talking by phone. “I know how important this mission is. You’ve got the right man on the job,” the baby is saying by phone, telling Tim straight off when he realises he’s been outed that he’s the boss, not Tim, and there’s only so much love to go round.

Boss Baby has been sent by Baby Corp to investigate an evil plot of PuppyCo, to put babies out of business in favour of pets. He spouts businesses: “Think outside the box,” “If you think you can, or if you think you can’t — you’re right,” a Henry Ford dictum. When their parents are captured, however, the siblings finally pull together.

“The theme of the movie, and I don’t think it’s a spoiler, is that there’s plenty of love to go round and it’s not about getting love but giving love,” McGrath said in Annecy.

Looking back to “The Lady and the Tramp” and “Peter Pan,” backgrounds are more “impressionistic,” in “Boss Baby,” McGrath said. “That means you can focus your eye on where to look.

One example: In one climax sequence, as the young brothers escape from the villain’s brother, Eugene, disguised as a nanny. They do so cycling through a white picket suburb, set against a broad stretch of blue sky and green grass.

One pudgy baby friend, Jimbo, has the body of as mini sumo wrestler. As boss baby and elder bro escape to get to Vegas to save their parents, Eugene running after the babies in frantic pursuit attempting to grab a firetruck with Jimbo in it. But it runs away from him down the road, Eugene’s body stretching in desperation as he tries to hold on.

For McGrath, current animation is rapidly widening its gamut. “As Guillermo del Toro put it in his masterclass yesterday at Annecy, animation is not a genre but a medium. There are a lot of different works: Drama, horror, adult-oriented stuff,” McGrath said.

And there are a lot different looks, he added: “‘Madagascar’ is very different from ‘Dragons’ which is very different from ‘Voltron’ which is very different from ‘Trollhunters.’

If McGrath is right, as in live-action, a future animated movie’s success is likely to depend more and more not on its being the latest offering from a big Hollywood studio but on that movie’s originality.

It’s what modern fairytales are made of.

A classical violinist wracked with self-doubt takes a job teaching children in one of Brazil’s most crime-ridden favelas, and ends up creating an orchestra with young delinquents and teenage mothers.

Except the story behind “The Violin Teacher”, a film which has been moving audiences to tears, is true.

And the Latin American movements it is based on, which teach poor children how to play instruments after school, have been hailed as the future of classical music.

Having seen his young actors drawn from a tough Sao Paulo slum learn to play Bach as he shot the film, director Sergio Machado is now evangelical about the city’s Baccarelli Institute.

“It is magical. What they do is fantastic,” he told AFP in an interview by phone from Brazil.

Machado’s own 11-year-old son was so impressed by what he saw happening on set that he took up the violin himself.

The institute, set up by musician Silvio Baccarelli in 1996 in the sprawling favela of Heliopolis, is “one of the most important cultural projects in Brazil”, Machado said.

Inspired to some degree by Venezuela’s El Sistema movement — which has produced a long line of classical music prodigies from equally humble backgrounds including Gustavo Dudamel, now head of the Los Angeles Philharmonic — it aims to give children a refuge from often chaotic and dangerous lives.

Three thousand children a year pass through the institute, which has been championed by the Indian-born star conductor Zubin Mehta.

Machado was initially sceptical about the method before being utterly won over.

“The great conductor, Italian Claudio Abbado said that because of this and what El Sistema is doing, Latin America is the future of classical music. And he is right.”

The director said he didn’t set out to make a sugary tearjerker that just played on the emotions but wanted to reflect the true reality of people’s lives.

“Yet there is hope. I wanted to do a film about people who are trying to change this really dark reality,” he added.

“All of the kids in the film are non-actors. They all came from that community and brought their own experience into the film and they are playing themselves.

“There is one scene where a girl starts screaming about her life. That is real, she is talking about herself,” he said.

At first Machado wanted to cast a white actor as their inspirational teacher “because I was kind of thinking of myself”.

But Lazaro Ramos, one of Brazil’s biggest stars, begged him to play the violinist, a gifted soloist who cracks during an audition for the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra.

“He wanted it so much. ‘I have never begged for a part in my life’, he told me. ‘I need to do this, because it’s my life. I come from places like this and this happened to me’.”

Just as in the film, a brilliant teacher spotted Ramos’s talent and helped save him from the streets.

Ramos “comes from a very, very tough situation”, Machado said. “His mother died when he was very small, he has known hunger and the worst kind of problems and yet he became a star.”

That helped to bond him to the favela kids in the orchestra, Machado said.

“He is what all these kids want to be. He understands them. They are what he was. We became very close.”

And with the exception of the final concert, when the institute’s orchestra took up the relay, all the music in the film from rap to Strauss is played by the actors.

“In a normal city the musicians come from the middle classes. Here they come from the common people, really the common people,” said Brazil’s most revered conductor Isaac Karabtchevsky, who loves to work at the institute.

“I find it amazing that you can play Mahler with these children. I believe that God is there.”

“The Violin Teacher” is on release across much of Europe and Asia this summer.

 

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