The Breadwinner

It was good. Powerful film. As a writer, and a lover of a good story, this was a good story. A glimpse into the look of lives, human lives, that many seem to forget about whenever speaking about the middle east. It reminds me of a more, hopeful version of Grave of the fireflies. Again, a lot more hopeful, but no less powerful. Especially the ending. Worth watching.

This movie gets a perfect score for me, but it's not for everyone.

Recently I saw many movies and even animated movies. But they were all made to impress in cheap ways such as huge stakes, awesome CGI and well known actors. The Breadwinner for me does so much more with so much less.

This movie however is about characters you wouldn't normally care about. About a story so far from your living room that you wont bother to check. And yet, this is why it touched me. It's a realistic take of a distant world. The characters and situations are as down to earth as possible, even compared to live action movies. The soul this movie has, with the small stakes of a poor family and even how a girl copes with the loss of her brother, is what most directors and writers fail to deliver. The movie gives many cultural elements of how an Afgan family lives, how men differ from women and how the whole city works.

I had to check and see if everything depicted in the movie was real in some way. This was a fictional story but so well crafted that left me stunned. I thought it could be a biography like the 10 year old cartoon movie Persepolis (which has similar style and setting) but it's not.

The description of this movie "an 11-year-old girl who cuts off her hair and dresses like a boy to support her family", put me off at first because it reminded me of Mulan. This may not be a blockbuster but it is a superior film made by a smaller company.

This is the kind of film that should be celebrated on account of its various political stands all the while presenting a disillusioned tale of the life especially for women and children in an oppressive society that has been shaped not only due to an idiosyncratic yet terrifying form of fundamentalist religion but also because of the continuous warfare of the Afghan region that always treat them as collateral damage. In a lot of fields, this film surpasses a lot of other films that are being celebrated in 2017 for exactly those fields.

Cartoon Saloon shows us a moving story in Afghanistan; the plot is good, the characters are charismatic, the animation is excellent and the soundtrack is very good; I highly recommend it.

From the creators of The Secret of Kells & Song of the Sea comes an unexpectedly bleak, depressing & powerfully evocative story that's crafted with the same passion, devotion & intimacy as their previous efforts, and paints a dark, disturbing & daring portrait of life under the regime of terror. Arresting, enchanting & thoroughly captivating, The Breadwinner is another winning feature from Cartoon Saloon that not only establishes them as a strong creative force but also catapults them into the same league as Pixar, Laika & Studio Ghibli.