June 8th, Movie 9

I was looking for a shorter film today to work for the June Swoon. I was hoping for somewhere around 90 minutes or so and so I stopped on the Sony Animation film on Netflix called Vivo.

I couldn’t believe it when I heard Lin-Manuel Miranda’s voice coming out of the animated kinkajou that was named Vivo. This was a musical featuring a kinkajou that was a street performer along with an older man named Andrés Hernández (Juan de Marcos González). Andrés received an invite to come see a famous singer named Marta Sandoval (Gloria Estefan), whom he had left years before. He was hoping to deliver to her the song he wrote when she left, but he died before he could leave Cuba for her Miami concert.

Vivo decided to deliver the song for him, with the help of a little girl without much musical skill named Gabi (Ynairaly Simo).

Much of Vivo was average, particularly the story. There was little original among the plot or of the character design. However, the music was really strong, many of which were written by Lin-Manuel Miranda himself. The animation was well done too, using some excellent computer generated animation that made the film easy to watch.

I would be lying if I said that, despite the formulaic structure, I did not find myself a little emotional at the ending of the film so there must have been something that the movie had done right.

I wanted to shout out one particular voice actor that I picked up. Michael Rooker appeared as a Burmese python named Lutador.

Vivo is not a stand out film, but it had some great music and looked good. You could do worse.