They Shot The Piano Player Review – Five Star Animation Story, A Must See

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Category: Indies, Docs, Foreign Film

Published on Monday, 27 November 2023 10:51

Written by Janet Walker

They Shot the Piano Player, from Sony Pictures Classics, presents a captivating animated true story, an investigative piece that follows a journalist as he uncovers the truth behind the mysterious disappearance of Brazilian virtuoso Francisco Tenorio Jr.

The film begins in New York City, with music journalist, Jeff Harris, voiced by Jeff Goldblum, at the introduction of a book signing. His publisher explains that this was not the book he had planned on writing, but this is where the story went.

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From then the film, which could have easily been a live action investigative piece, but with the vibrancy of the music scene in Brazilian and Buenos Aries, the captivating animation is perfect and enhances the story.

So, it is New York, 2010, when Jeff Harris, by chance stumbled onto the name of a Brazilian pianist named Francisco Tenório Júnior, and instantly became captivated by his sound. He explains in the film he was looking through other album jackets and never saw him again; it was like he had disappeared.

His curiosity to find out more about the mysterious Tenorio, whom he also mentioned, could have just met his demise in the same way many 1970s music stars had, in a plane or bus crash or an overdose, but there would have at least been notice of that sad ending.

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With the current book, also on the samba-jazz scene required he spend time in Buenos Aries, and soon he became obsessed with finding out more about Tenorio. Which is where the story takes on more intrigue.

As it is a story of samba-Jazz, Brazil, Bueno Aires, Argentina and the entire culture of the region, carnival and all the vibrancy of the imagination is active. With just the knowledge that Tenorio, who was well liked, well thought of, a virtuoso, loved, and desired, disappeared in Buenos Aires on March 18, 1976, Harris sets out to find out more.

As he pulls back each layer, we are also treated to the rise of a Latin jazz beat, that drew musicians and greats like Ella Fitzgerald to Rio de Janeiro to be a part of the sound that was considered significant for the time, it become synonymous with the season of vitality, life, love, freedom, beauty, vibrancy before political unrest would roll through the streets and with it usher in a devastatingly dark period in history for Argentina.

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As the story continues, Harris interviews both Tenorio’s wife and children and his lover, who he was with on the night of his disappearance. We understand, piece by piece, that the worst happened. Tenorio’s story was one of many, we begin to understand and the journalist continues to knock on doors, seek interviews, and elicit information which leads further into a political revolution, which as a musician Tenorio, was simply not a part of, and by the middle of the film, we understand he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and literally kidnapped by the Argentina hit squad who rounded up “subversives” essentially anyone on the streets after midnight.

Here is where Harris meets with the local political officials and is told about the infamous ESMA, which is called the Auschwitz of Argentina. The disappeared were brought here to be interrogated, beaten, and eventually murdered. The film, even in the animation, does justice to the tens of thousands of disappeared souls, who have yet to be found and the government has refused to acknowledge fault.

They Shot the Piano Player takes animation to a new level. The attention to detail is meticulous. There is so much to see and absorb in the film, with the vibrancy of the region, the colors, and even the double-microphone tape recorder the journalist uses is perfect in detail. It is impressive.

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The true story of a time when Brazilian Jazz was entering into the mainstream, and the sound creates an intoxicating vision, to have a virtuoso murdered, and taken without the full body of his work realized, leaves a gapping hole in the music world. The interviews with his former bandmates, others who knew him, are also featured.

They Shot The Piano Player captures a fleeting time bursting with creative freedom at a turning point in Latin American history in the 1960s and 1970s. A captivating true story, that weaves in both the explosion of Samba Jazz and the Bossa Nova, and the dark season of the disappeared, some 30,000 intellectuals, musicians, students, mothers, wives, and children, of which the nation still has not recognized its dark history.

By the end of the story, Tenorio will be one to be remembered and maybe, who knows, his sound, the small body of work he created during his short life will once again burst on the scene with the vitality of life.

Fabulous transporting music, stunning animation, They Shot the Piano Player is a five-star experience! See it! Playing in theaters. Check local listings.

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Country: U.S.

Language: English, Portuguese with English subtitles.

Runtime: 103 minutes.

Director: Javier Mariscal, Fernando Trueba. 

Writer: Fernando Trueba.

Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Caetano Veloso, Joao Gilberto.