{"id":21583,"date":"2016-07-25T20:50:54","date_gmt":"2016-07-26T00:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=21583"},"modified":"2020-07-29T11:12:11","modified_gmt":"2020-07-29T15:12:11","slug":"psychonauts-the-forgotten-children-2016-fantasia-international-film-festival-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/25\/psychonauts-the-forgotten-children-2016-fantasia-international-film-festival-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Psychonauts, the Forgotten Children (2016) [Fantasia International Film Festival 2016]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Psychonauts\"<\/a>I think audiences will enjoy the incessantly dreary and bleak tone of “Psychonauts, The Forgotten Children,” but for me it felt a step too heavy and morose and undercut a lot of the attempts at whimsy and absurd humor. \u201cPsychonauts\u201d is adapted from Alberto V\u00e1zquez\u2019s independent Spanish language graphic novel \u201cPsiconautas,\u201d which featured the character Bird Boy, who starred in his own award winning short film from Vazquez. Bird Boy returns in the film as a side character who is relentlessly pursued by local officers, both of whom want him dead and will do whatever it takes to kill him, despite his seemingly innocent habit with \u201cHappy pills\u201d he\u2019s dependent on to keep demons at bay.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile mouse Dinky is desperate to run away from her adoptive family that pressures her to become an engineer, oblivious to the landfills outside of their town that involve rats. These rats look for copper to survive, and the tensions rise as the space for survival grows smaller. I had a love hate relationship with \u201cPsychonauts.\u201d Originally I was so excited to see it since the animation is absolutely beautiful, but it\u2019s such a heavy handed and dire metaphor for poverty and conformity I was actually not entertained all that much. Granted, when I savored the brilliant animation style, I loved what Alberto Vazquez and Pedro Rivero had to offer audiences alike.<\/p>\n

But once I dug in to the story, it was a pretty miserable experience with tales about scavenging rats, drug addicted bird boys, and young teenage mice with dark voices tempting them to murder their friends and family. Alberto V\u00e1zquez and Pedro Rivero\u2019s \u201cPsychonauts\u201d is a haunting, very heavy animated film with stark political and social overtones. Those themes hobble it in some instances, sadly, muddying up the excellent animation, and richer more complex tale about madness, and looking for a purpose in a land where opportunity involves murder and or conformity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think audiences will enjoy the incessantly dreary and bleak tone of “Psychonauts, The Forgotten Children,” but for me it felt a step too heavy and morose and undercut a lot of the attempts at whimsy and absurd humor. \u201cPsychonauts\u201d is adapted from Alberto V\u00e1zquez\u2019s independent Spanish language graphic novel \u201cPsiconautas,\u201d which featured the character […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497,1284,12],"tags":[64,99,111,240,302,349,367,501,752,1087],"class_list":["post-21583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fantasia-fest","category-festivalsevents","category-movie-reviews","tag-adaptation","tag-animation","tag-arthouse","tag-crime","tag-drama","tag-fantasy","tag-foreign","tag-indie-film","tag-p","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21583"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21586,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21583\/revisions\/21586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}