Birdboy: The Forgotten Children

If Hayao Miyazaki remade Animal Farm, the result might resemble this darkly comic fable about mice, dogs, foxes, and pigs making their way through a post-apocalyptic landscape. Dinky, an outspoken mouse, lives with sanctimonious Christian parents who obviously prefer her little brother, a bulldog in a luchadora mask. Although he has nothing but harsh words for Dinky, her engineer father dotes on her robotic alarm clock. Dinky is fascinated by Birdboy, a mute orphan who lives in an abandoned lighthouse (with his oversized head, hollow eyes, and dark suit, he looks like a refugee from a Henry Selick film). Dinky tells her friends that as long as Birdboy snacks on happy pills—which she sneaks from her parents—he can contain the demon inside of him (the demon really appears, but feels more like a manifestation of trauma). Misunderstood and mistreated, Birdboy is a loner who bonds more with nature than humanity. But Dinky and her friends also have problems of their own, trying to save money to escape their island, which leads to encounters with shady characters, including an army of bloodthirsty rats. Adapted from Alberto Vázquez's graphic novel Psiconautas (which was previously made into a short film), co-directors Vázquez and Pedro Rivero’s strikingly original film won the Goya (or Spanish Oscar) for best animated feature. Recommended. (K. Fennessy)