Jazz is all about the rough edges. It’s smooth, seductive music but comes from the body, not from the mind, revealing color, improvisation and imagination.
So I should to be kinder to “Chico and Rita,” an Oscar nominee and animated musical that has all the style and class of a good jazz number but plays all the wrong notes.
It’s about a piano player and a nightclub singer in Havana who fall in love, work together briefly, but then split up as they make the big time in New York. The problem is that Chico (Eman Xor Ona) is a womanizing scamp and Rita (Limara Meneses) is an empty-headed broad with a great voice. They’re constantly on-again, off-again as these one-dimensional figures can’t go 10 minutes without cheating on each other, getting jealous and leaving in a huff. It’s the only real thing providing drama throughout the story, and all the political and racial discourse is shoed into the movie at the last minute.
The movie’s style has that jagged, amateurish aesthetic to it as well. It’s very simple cel shading, hard lines and no figurative depth within the frame, looking very colorful but very simplistic. You wish the whole movie looked like the stencil drawn dream sequence that references “Casablanca” and “On the Town.”
So the music is what drives the excitement, and “Chico and Rita” takes great pains at capturing the authentic Havana sound of the ‘40s, even paying attention to tiny cultural details to provide a little more life.
But if you wanted a fun musical that didn’t wallow in romantic clichés and melodrama, you could try something like “Sita Sings the Blues” and really learn a thing or two about culture. This is just more like elevator music.
2 ½ stars
Note: The movie is distributed by GKids, but this is not a kids movie, as it features drug use, swearing and nudity. Cartoon nudity, admittedly, but full frontal, sexually charged cartoon nudity all the same.