Allegro non troppo

Bruno Bozzetto's 1976 Italian masterwork arrives before us today as something of a curiosity in the annals of social consciousness cinema: a film with essentially none. This is, by the rigorous standards of our analytical framework, a near-pristine specimen. We examine it the way a geologist might examine a rock with no fossils, with professional interest and a faint, private sense of relief.

The film's most subversive act is imprisoning its animator in a dungeon, which functions as a mild critique of producer-driven creative exploitation. This is the extent of its ideological footprint. The live-action framing device, in which an overbearing producer conscripts an orchestra of elderly women and a hapless physical comedian to recreate Disney's Fantasia on an Italian budget, does carry a whisper of anti-capitalist satire, aimed squarely at the entertainment industry's tendency to treat artists as livestock. Bozzetto makes this point and then immediately undercuts it with a pratfall, because he is Italian and it is 1976 and nobody has yet informed him that comedy is supposed to be a delivery mechanism for policy positions.

The animated segments themselves range from the genuinely beautiful to the cosmically bleak, and none of them have an agenda. The Bolero sequence, depicting the entire arc of civilization emerging from a discarded Coca-Cola bottle, could be read as environmental commentary by someone working very hard. We are not prepared to work that hard. Bozzetto is a satirist in the classical mode: he is interested in the human condition as a whole, which is an unfashionably large canvas. The film scores low across nearly every marker we track, not because it lacks intelligence or artistic ambition, but because it predates the specific strain of cultural consciousness we are tasked with measuring, and would almost certainly have found it baffling.