Film Review Essay of Boy

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Boy, written and directed by Taika Waititi, is a beautiful New Zealand film about an 11 year old Māori child’s search for his “potential”. His name is Boy and he loves Michael Jackson. The film is set in 1984 and takes place in the scenic community of Waihau Bay on the eastern coast of New Zealand. Boy lives with his grandmother, younger brother Rocky and cousins and takes care of them when she is away. The two siblings grew up without their father Alamein’s presence because he was imprisoned for his involvement in criminal activity. Boy’s father is his hero and is the subject of his many valiant fantasies as a deep sea diver, star football player and military legend and so on. Alamein suddenly returns after a seven year absence heavily disrupting Boy’s life.

Themes and Context
Boy explores themes of childhood, innocence, influence, duty and integrity and is at times, humorous, playful, serious and heavy. The film is a fiction and uses a chronological narrative employing the classical filmmaking model of Continuity editing defined by Berliner and Cohen as “a system of editing devices that establish a continuous presentation of space and time” .
Waititi’s film makes use of the gorgeous landscape with a multitude of shots and camera angles and successfully gives the viewer an immersive experience. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and competed in the “World Cinema Narrative” category. This film is a representation of Māori reality as it would have been in the 1980s within a globalized and colonial context and Boy’s obsession with Michael Jackson demonstrates a portrayal of the spread of Western culture within that time period.

Critical Analysis
Despite the Māori context and location of Waititi’s film, Boy appears to be s...

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... any part of world and they we can all learn from his story.

Works Cited

Todd Berliner and Dale J. Cohen, "The Illusion of Continuity: Active Perception and the Classical Editing System," Journal Of Film & Video 63, no. 1 (2011): 45.
RT Staff, "2010 Sundance Film Festival Lineup Announced", Rotten Tomatoes (Flixster), December 2, 2009, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/news/1858193/2010_sundance_film_festival_lineup_announced (accessed April 16, 2014).

Peter Debruge, “Review of Boy”, Variety, January 23, 2010, http://variety.com/2010/film/reviews/boy-1117941952 (accessed April 16, 2014).

Ann Hardy, "Hidden gods - Religion, spirituality and recent New Zealand cinema." Studies In Australasian Cinema 6, no. 1 (2012): 19.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of looking: an introduction to visual culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 259-260.

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