Vivo (2021)

The kinkajou is the detail that tells us what kind of film this is. Vivo, a 2021 animated musical from Sony and Netflix, follows a small furry musician from a Havana plaza to a Miami stage, tasked with delivering a love song on behalf of a dead man. The premise is modest and the execution is polished. Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the songs and voices the animal, and the whole enterprise hums with professional competence.

What is most notable about the production is the cast assembled around it. Zoe Saldaña, Juan de Marcos González, Gloria Estefan, and a deep bench of Latine performers populate a story that treats Cuban music as a living inheritance rather than set dressing. The film never stops to explain this. It simply is. That quiet confidence is rarer than it ought to be, and it deserves acknowledgment even from a critic who arrived skeptical. The child at the center, Gabi, is a girl of ten with a gift for rapping and an inability to read a room. Her oddness is presented as temperament, not condition. Nothing here diagnoses her, and nothing here needs to.

The rest of the running time is spent on grief, which the film handles with a light touch. A widowed mother, a song that survives its composer, a night in the Everglades with a lovesick spoonbill. There is no lecture delivered, no villain drawn from the ranks of the wealthy, no weather sermon. The women carry the plot without the film ever announcing that they do. The result is agreeable and slight, a pleasant way to spend ninety minutes. It aims for the heart, hits it softly, and then it ends. Not every film needs a thesis.