Perhaps after “E.T” (Steven Spielberg / 1982), the best children’s film dealing with aliens and extraterrestrials, is Paola Randi’s “Little Tito and the Aliens”. However, the story of her film is perhaps closer to “Contact” (Robert Zemeckis / 1997): The pursuit of contacting the deceased through radio waves beamed into space, done here in a childish tone. Ms. Randi doesn’t fill her film with the contraptions of recent science fiction films. Instead of battles, spaceships and laser weapons, her film focuses on human emotions. The experiments of a scientist, the watchfulness of military personnel, the insistence of a little boy on wanting to talk to his long-lost dad, a teenage girl’s dreams of glitz and glamour; all these serve the same point; the need for closeness among people, in order to solve their problems. This message for the children of our era, one of loneliness and isolation, is perhaps the most important aspect of the film. And yet, the film also succeeds in capturing the attention of its young audience in the way it advances its narrative; in its creation of dramatic suspension through combining not only satire and the serious, but also fantasy and reality. Those amazing images – that appear on the horizon near the end of story – are reminiscent of the silver screen itself; in a tribute to cinema.
A Tribute to Cinema \ Mehrzad Danesh Review of “Little Tito and the Aliens”
