The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation

As father and son heart to hearts go, this is quite a poignant animation that borders on a semi-autobiographic documentary on the lives of the Cannizzaro family. With his father having died in hospital after suffering a stroke, his son still has conversations with his “man on the moon” dad as he tries to unravel the complexities of their lives. Using some quite skilfully coloured active-animating, photographs and some real-time newspaper reportage , we embark on half an hour of mafia-related tales that touch on prohibition, murder, arson and a fair amount of paternal angst as the narrator, his brother and mother struggled through a life dictated by the erratic behaviour of a man whose temperament, and temper, could change as easily as the weather. Of course as the father tells his story, he isn’t as harsh on himself as his son would have us believe, and so their journey of exploration, explanation and perhaps reconciliation combines to present us with some akin to a Mario Puzo novel. It ebbs and flows a bit, and some of it comes across as a little self-indulgent from auteur John Canemaker, but it has elements of innovation to it as it washes it’s dirty laundry in public. It is too long, but it’s a different kind of storytelling that’s worth a look.