X
- 2018
- R
- 1091 Pictures
- 1 h 34 m
- 2018
- R
- 1091 Pictures
- 1 h 34 m
Summary Us three. Us brothers. Us kings, inseparable. Three boys tear through their childhood, in the midst of their young parents’ volatile love that makes and unmakes the family many times over. While Manny and Joel grow into versions of their loving and unpredictable father, Ma seeks to shelter her youngest, Jonah, in the cocoon of home. More...
Directed By: Jeremiah Zagar
Written By: Justin Torres, Daniel Kitrosser, Jeremiah Zagar
- 2018
- R
- 1091 Pictures
- 1 h 34 m
- 2018
- R
- 1091 Pictures
- 1 h 34 m
We the Animals
80
6.4
Where to Watch
Summary Us three. Us brothers. Us kings, inseparable. Three boys tear through their childhood, in the midst of their young parents’ volatile love that makes and unmakes the family many times over. While Manny and Joel grow into versions of their loving and unpredictable father, Ma seeks to shelter her youngest, Jonah, in the cocoon of home. More...
Directed By: Jeremiah Zagar
Written By: Justin Torres, Daniel Kitrosser, Jeremiah Zagar
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 27 Critic Reviews
80
81% Positive
22 Reviews
22 Reviews
15% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
4% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 27 Critic Reviews
80
81% Positive
22 Reviews
22 Reviews
15% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
4% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
A film that feels like something conjured out of memory and magic, a poetic, often ecstatic re-creation of childhood that captures its ungovernable pleasures as vividly as its most threatening terrors.
While Zagar doesn’t force the material into many surprising places, it’s a fully realized tapestry, owing much to the complex, layered score by Nick Zammuto that hums through nearly every scene, and frequent cutaways to hand-drawn animation based on the scrapbook that Jonah stores under his bed at night.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 34 User Ratings
6.4
62% Positive
21 Ratings
21 Ratings
21% Mixed
7 Ratings
7 Ratings
18% Negative
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 34 User Ratings
6.4
62% Positive
21 Ratings
21 Ratings
21% Mixed
7 Ratings
7 Ratings
18% Negative
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
A man, a woman, three boys, and a world full of turbulent emotion. Two of the boys seem to emulate their parents while one externalizes his pain through drawings that crudely convey a striking range of emotion. How will it end? Fortunately, the denouement is left to the viewer's imagination. Not for children of any age.
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WE THE ANIMALS is so close to home. It is beautiful, it is poetic, sometimes it is toxic yet I can’t get enough of it. A coming-of-age story that really knows when to be a kid and when everything starts to really matter. It's like Moonlight and Tree of Life have a baby !
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This is “The Florida Project” set in Pennsylvania, a memoir both brilliantly specific and depressingly universal.
One of the discoveries of the year so far.
At any moment, We the Animals might look and sound gorgeous—yet the film unfolds with a naturalistic pace that plods like a too-lazy summer day. This gorgeous view demands ample, ample patience.
It is a thing of beauty: too beautiful perhaps, running a real danger of prettifying poverty.
For all its deft style and sympathetic characters, there’s still something missing in We,The Animals. In its efforts to evoke a young boy’s inner-world, it falls short of fully capturing his emotional reality. Jonah’s story should be heartbreaking, but when we see images of him flying over the forest, it’s just picturesque and lyrical.
A poignant and poetic evocation of childhood
A remarkably contained and intimate story featuring only five main cast members, We the Animals is about a young boy awakening to his ****. Equal parts lyricism and grittiness, the film looks at how the crystallising of one's perception of the world goes hand-in-hand with a loss of innocence. Less concerned with narrative beats and character arcs than with tone and visual poetry, the film operates in a similar magical realist key as Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), whilst also calling to mind the Texas scenes of The Tree of Life (2011). And although the narrative could be accused of being a little insubstantial, this is an effective and poignant evocation of childhood.
Set in upstate New York in the 1990s, the film tells the story of nine-year-old Jonah (Evan Rosado), who lives with his Ma (Sheila Vand) and Paps (Raúl Castillo), and two slightly older brothers, Manny (Isaiah Kristian) and Joel (Josiah Gabriel). Existing just above the poverty line, the family is tightly-knit but dysfunctional, with Ma and Paps both prone to lashing out violently. When a neighbouring boy shows the brothers a porn movie, Jonah is taken aback when he reacts so strongly to a brief clip of two men having sex.
We the Animals is the fiction debut of Jeremiah Zagar, and was written for the screen by Zagar and Daniel Kitrosser, from Justin Torres's semi-autobiographical 2011 novel. Much like the novel, rather than presenting a classically structured plot, the film is instead composed of vignettes presented in a broadly chronological manner. Essentially a bildungsroman, the film covers some of the same thematic ground as Moonlight (2016), albeit it with a more esoteric tone. In a similar manner, although its depiction of the brothers' mischief recalls The Florida Project (2017), We the Animals is far more lyrical.
Initially the trio are presented as relatively indistinguishable from one another, but this begins to change as Jonah's self-awareness grows and he begins to withdraw from his siblings. At the same time, the voiceover narration becomes less frequent. Tied into this are the crayon pictures which he draws which change from innocent doodling to sexualised and violent images. Also important is how well Zagar uses the mise en scène to suggest psychology; as the film progresses, we see less of Jonah huddled under the bed covers with his brothers, and more of him alone under his bed. Zagar's documentarian background is also noticeable in his use of the techniques of cinéma vérité. In terms of focalisation, the film is tied rigidly to Jonah's perspective. In a general sense, this can be seen in the frequency with which cinematographer Zak Mulligan places the camera at Jonah's eye level. A more specific example involves a scene when Paps is arguing with another man off-camera; we can hear the voices, but not clearly, because neither can Jonah. Also important is that the film is shot on grainy Super 16, predominately with wide lenses and a shallow depth of field, robbing the image of sheen and depth, and thus foregrounding the impreciseness of memory, as if we are looking at events through gauze, half-remembered and half-embellished, as if there is no distinction between past and present, which reminded me a little of Mirror (1975) and Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988).
Thematically, although the film deals with domestic violence, Paps isn't the only one guilty of such behaviour; Ma is also shown as possessing a violent temper. Some of the dialogue also carries darker implications. For example, Ma tells Jonah that when children are 10, they leave their parents, asking him, "promise me you'll stay mine forever." When he asks how, she says, "you're not 10, you're 9+1". There's a beauty to this sentiment, but so too is there something unhealthy about it.
In terms of problems, for all its lyricism, the film never really says anything new, and it suffers in comparison to masterworks such as Tree of Life and Beasts of the Southern Wild. Another issue is that there is a sense that Zagar is more interested in lyricism than emotion; in trying to convey Jonah's interiority through abstract visual poetry, he neglects the issue of emotional realism. This should be a heartbreaking film, but it isn't, mainly because the characters exist primarily to facilitate philosophical musing, rather than as unique entities in themselves.
That aside, however, We the Animals is an impressive debut. Very much focused on the impressionistic and chaotic nature of memory, it depicts a young life yet to be fully formed, with its inconclusive ending reminding us that life doesn't have a three-act structure. And this might be the film's crowning achievement; in a story about the past and how we access it, the final impression with which it leaves us is that we can never know what lies in our future.
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This film starts as 3 young brothers tear thru their summer; running, screaming and full of life. It doesn't develop into a traditional narrative, but offers episodic glimpses of their family with lots of artistic flourishes. Their parents' tumultuous relationship creates most of the conflict, but it's told thru the eyes of the youngest brother. He has an inner life that's expressed in flights of fantasy and intense drawings (animated for extra impact). It takes some time for the story to come into focus, but once it does there's an interesting new layer that makes it sweeter. Still, it's more ambitious, artsy observation than compelling character study.
Report
Another coming of age story, this time about three brothers growing up in a poor family.
The film is made in a very artsy way. There is no straight narrative, it feels more like a dotted line made of impressions.
The brothers are very happy together and seem to be inseparable.
While two older brothers will probably turn into two copies of their macho father, the youngest one of the three is an artist and puts all his life experiences into his secret sketch notebook.
Outstanding cinematography and very strong acting.
I did not like the ending though. To me it seemed to be an artificial and unnecessary twist.
Overall, I did enjoy watching it but your mileage might very.
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I stopped hating people about 40 years ago just as I stopped hating ‘things’ 30 years ago but I have never stopped hating movies that I walk out of thinking “What the hell was that about?”, going home, reading a dozen critics that raved about the movie and not understanding what they are raving about!
I hate a 90-minute movie that seems like 3 hours and gets nowhere and worse than all I hate talking about the movie and thinking people will point a finger at me saying I am writing spoilers when how can it be a spoiler when it doesn’t add or diminish from a nonstory?
Is “We the Animals” about 3 brothers constantly running here and there, screaming, robbing a store, at one point having nothing to eat, at another being thrown into the water so he will learn to swim or their beating on their father or being shirtless most of the time? Is it summertime or is it they just don’t go to school?
Or is it about kids running around without supervision just so the director can have camerawork showing kids being kids and being like all kids would like to be when they don’t have to answer to adults?
Is it about a kid realizing he is ****? Is it about a supposed pedophile? Is it an excuse to show some porn?
Is it about a man beating his wife who he loves and her staying because she loves him? Is it about the parents loving their children though both working different jobs at night so the kids have to sleep where the father works?
Is it about life for one family in Utica, New York?
The 3 kids play their roles, the dad is masculine looking, a loser but not shown that way with all he has, the mother acts stronger and weaker than the role calls for and the few supporting characters do what is asked of them except the one that might or not be a pedophile.
I don’t know what “We the Animals” is about so please go and tell me what you saw and heard, aside from some beautiful set scenes with kids being kids, brothers being brothers, when they are left alone.
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Production Company
Cinereach,
Public Record
Release Date Aug 17, 2018
Duration 1 h 34 m
Rating R
Genres
Tagline Based on the Acclaimed Novel
Awards
CinEuphoria Awards
• 3 Wins & 12 Nominations
Film Independent Spirit Awards
• 5 Nominations
Chlotrudis Awards
• 5 Nominations
