Animated film looks at life through boy’s eyes

The dark horse in the animated-feature Academy Awards race, “Boy and the World,” by Brazilian filmmaker Al? Abreu, looks and sounds nothing like its competition.

Hand-drawn using a mixture of colored pencil, photo collage and paint, it’s the story of a small boy who discovers the big world when he goes in search of his migrant-worker father.

Set to a jazzy score by Ruben Feffer and Gustavo Kurlat, “Boy and the World” tells its story — at times wondrously, and at times with an awe approaching uneasiness — wordlessly. The dialogue is gibberish that sounds like Portuguese played backwards.

It is the most purely visual of the Oscar-nominated animated films, despite a hero whose face resembles little more than an oversize shirt button with two long, slit-like holes for eyes.

That we see the world through those eyes — everything from a rainbow-colored pebble to the factories that mill cotton fabric for shirts — only adds to the sense of amazement and bewilderment that the film inspires. It also contains a critique of environmental degradation, income inequity and globalization, in an approach that is at once subtler and more powerful than similar mainstream children’s films.

The frequently surreal plot takes no pains to avoid alarming younger viewers who might be dismayed to see a protagonist of tender age wandering around without supervision.

The make-believe world of “Boy and the World” is confusing, scary and gorgeous. But then again, so is the real one.