The Breadwinner

90 Cartoon Saloon once again knocks it out of the park with their most moving story to date, and one of their single best characters. Breadwinner is pure narrative, telling a tragic story of a girl living in Afghanistan during a terrible civil and external war fought by millions. Every second of this movie is so hard to watch, yet so hard to look away. It opens your eyes to the true horrors and shame that women of Afghanistan are forced to feel daily, and to show that there is no changing it, only surviving it. I love the pacing and scope we view this story through, we spend the whole movie with Parvana, and she is such a well-written, driven, and hearted girl, so graceful yet strong and super easy to root for. I especially really enjoyed how they told her biggest hurdles through her brother's fairytale and later real story alike, they give us a new form to look at her grief and struggles that she hides so well throughout, and to see her finally get it out by the end is both relieving and heartbreaking. know I don't have personal experience with Afghani culture but from what I do know this movie is faithful to the bitter end, from the food to the streets every piece has a purpose, and that purpose is to hurt our protagonist and her family, the way her home feels so warm yet so cold when we leave it is a testament to how millions must live daily, it's stories like this that remind me how lucky I am to be sitting, watching a movie and writing a review about it on a laptop, a punch in the mouth to be grateful. My god is this movie is beautiful, typical of Cartoon Saloon but the warm tones just shine somehow even when that's all their is, and the color in Parvana's hijab is a stark contrast showing her resilience and determination to her main conflict. Not to mention the incredible visuals when we leave the plane of reality and into the realm of storytelling, not only did I love how much Parvana and her father valued stories but when we saw them I was in utter amaze, it was like watching a dream, endless colors, patterns, and movements to watch that tell a story like no other can. This movie is every bit at poignant, raw, and grounding as I expected, and even more emotional, humanizing, and slow than I ever expected, Parvana is not just a great character but a statue to everything that is good in people, I speak for myself when I say this movie has taught me heaps and bounds more than any one American literature could, and truly moved me.