Chico and Rita is an unfashionably sweet but bitter love story, an animated but definitely adult-oriented tale that follows the rise-and-fall trajectory of an Afro-Cuban jazz piano player and singer over three decades.
Although not strictly biographical, director Fernando Trueba and co-writer Martinez de Pison based their story of Chico (voice by Eman Xor Oña) and Rita (voice by Limara Meneses) on the lives of famous but unnamed Afro-Cuban musicians.
See Chico and Rita trailer HERE.
Against beautifully rendered hand-drawn backdrops of Las Vegas and Paris, from the Tropicana in Havana to the Village Vanguard in New York, the characters frolic, make music, lose and find each other.
Music by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Tito Puente and the great Chano Pozo fills out the score by Bebo Valdés.
In a scene recreated in the film, Pozo was murdered a short time after meeting Gillespie, but not before their historic 1947 Carnegie Hall performance that brought Afro-Cuban jazz to the U.S. (Pancho Sanchez’s Latin Jazz Band featuring Terrence Blanchard recreated the historic concert at the Monterey Jazz Festival last year).
Take Rango (2011) out of this year’s Best Animated Feature Academy Award competition, and the Oscar goes to Chico and Rita, coming in at one-tenth the budget (less than $12 million vs. Rango’s $135 million).
That kind of money buys heavy-hitting voice talent like Johnny Depp, Ned Beatty, Harry Dean Stanton and a battalion of animators and special effects artists. This is a classic “will win, should win” Oscar dilemma.
Chico and Rita is the first Spanish-speaking film to be nominated for best animated feature-length picture; it has already won the Goya and European Film Awards in the animated category. Director Fernando Trueba’s Belle Epoque won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1994.
See playdates and locations for Chico and Rita HERE.
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