REVIEW: Chico & Rita Is Sultry, Seductive Old-School Animation, Set to a Latin Beat

We’ve come to the point where hand-drawn animation almost seems like a forgotten art, lost in the gaudy shuffle of motion-capture slickness a la The Adventures of Tintin and the sleek technical sophistication of pictures like Rango and Kung-Fu Panda 2. That’s why it’s such a glorious relief to greet the arrival of an old-school -– but very grown-up -- animated picture like Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal and Tono Errando’s Chico & Rita, a romance that opens in late-1940s Cuba and uses a thumbnail history of midcentury Latin jazz as its backdrop.
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