The streets of Havana are awash with cigarette smoke, white rum and Latin jazz. This is Cuba, 1948, long before La Revolucin and the Bay of Pigs - a time when the seeds of civil disobedience had yet to sprout. As alluring as this virile young Havana is, however, Chico & Rita, as the title suggests, is not the story of a city, but a tale of two lovers. Off a rutted street we slip into a postcard cabaret club where Chico (Eman Xor Oa), a renowned local jazz pianist, and his bosom buddy Ramn (Mario Guerra) are on the prowl. Not for skirt, but for a singer. The drummer's four-count gets the house band started before a heavenly timbre fixes the room in hushed rapture. As Rita (Limara Meneses) lets fly, Chico's eyes widen in reverie as lust swells and bright lights beckon.
If this clichd overture fails to get your cardiac cords strumming, Chico & Rita probably isn't for you. Little of what follows secedes from the romantic melodrama formula, as our eponymous couple's fairy tale fling is defined by acts of unfaithfulness and moments of remorse, bitter farewells and affectionate reconcilement. Avoiding the obligatory would certainly give Chico & Rita greater resonance, but with tone and texture accented so emphatically, it's no surprise to see the narrative take a nosedive. As stardom sets Chico and Rita on separate paths, we drift through the years on airwaves ignited by a dulcet bolero that declares their love eternal. But as we leave the rattle and hum of Havana for the notably more pallid reaches of New York, Paris, Hollywood and Las Vegas, do we actually care where our lovesick duo will end up? Just about, perhaps. But Chico & Rita never quite feels like the product of a decade-long artistic relationship.
And yet that is what it is. One of Spain's most established and celebrated designers, Fernando Trueba, met Javier Mariscal after being asked to create a poster for the director's 2000 Latin jazz doc Calle 54. After years of close and fruitful collaboration, the idea of co-directing an animated feature presented Trueba and Mariscal with the perfect platform to showcase their mutual passion for Latin culture and Cuban jazz. Somehow, however, this passion doesn't quite come across as it should, even with the aid of an infectious soundtrack courtesy of legendary Cuban composer Bebo Valds.
The animation plays some part in this. While each and every frame drips with the rhythm and spirit of Cuban life in the mid-twentieth century, crude line-work means that our protagonists' emotions are never conveyed as profoundly as they are pledged. Havana might be little more than a backdrop, but in truth the film is at its most enchanting when this intoxicating city takes centre stage. For all their attention to detail, Mariscal and Trueba obscure the one character that might have made Chico & Rita the classic it strives so hard to be.
Sexy, sunny and sweet-natured, this lovely animation by film-maker Fernando Trueba and artist and designer Javier Mariscal is a 1940s love story with all the brassy passion of a Barry Manilow number, set in the nightclubs of Havana and New York. Rita, voiced by Limara Meneses, is a beautiful Cuban singer who has to scrape a living; Chico (Eman Xor Oa) is a talented, underemployed pianist thunderstruck with love for Rita when she meanders on stage for a solo. Their passionate affair and professional partnership is endangered when a smooth-talking Yankee impresario tells Rita he can take her to showbiz glory in New York, but has no interest in lover-boy Chico coming along as well. There is a wonderful set-piece when Chico offers to fill in one night for an absent musician in the Woody Herman Orchestra, breezily confident he can busk his way through any jazz number - only to discover he is expected to sight-read the piano part in Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto. The great names of both Cuban and American jazz are invoked, and Chico and Rita's tragicomic love story meshes very pleasingly with this musical backdrop. There is heartbreak, but a happy ending.
This animated charmer is a love story for all ages. Beginning in Havana in 1948, it charts the volatile romance between nightclub singer Rita and piano player Chico as they negotiate careers beyond their native Cuba. She becomes a star of Broadway and later Hollywood, while he tinkles the ivories for Dizzy Gillespie's band in Europe, yet fate will push them together and apart several times along the way. The fluid draughtsmanship conjures the streets and clubs of 1950s Cuba with intricate beauty, and then surpasses it on switching to New York, where legendary jazz venues such as the Village Vanguard are given their due. The star-crossed pair become victims of their own stubbornness, and later of the old-school racism endemic to American showbiz, yet the mood for the most part is exuberant, driven along by the composer Bebo Valds's smoky jazz score. By turns wistful, passionate, indignant and melancholy, this is an exquisitely composed piece of storytelling. Watch Chico & Rita Movie 2011 Online
Beautiful, seductive and spellbinding, this fluidly animated feature is the luscious love child of Fernando Trueba (director of the Oscar-winning Belle Epoque) and Spanish designer Javier Mariscal. At heart, it's an old-fashioned romance between Chico, a talented young Cuban piano player and Rita, a slinky and ambitious club singer - undoubtedly the sexiest gal to hit cartoons since Jessica Rabbit. But it's also a love-letter to Cuban music. Set against the colourful backdrops of Havana, New York, Las Vegas, Hollywood and Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s, musos will dig a jazz soundtrack that includes the legendary likes of Thelonious Monk, Cole Porter and Dizzy Gillespie.Onlin Movie Link Here: /7eu5qbj
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