Critic Reviews

An exceptional animated feature from Spain, Wrinkles imaginatively and sensitively explore one of the major issues confronting most of the developed world: how to look after senior citizens in a rapidly aging population.

Ignacio Ferreras's traditionally animated Wrinkles is a beautiful, subtle horror movie about the rigors of old age, made all the more horrifying because it will happen to all of us fortunate enough to live a long life.

Unfolding in simple yet wonderfully expressive hand-drawn frames, the film’s unsparingly observant plot depicts the slide into senility with empathy and imagination.

This movie has the same desolate quality as Philip Larkin's poem The Building, and yet it is tender and lovable, too.

It’s a compact and obliquely moving film, deftly constructed to let the dying of the light arrive, not as sunset, but a kind of dawn.

Its shuffling pace and basic animation all add to the heartbreak as the protagonists slowly unravel, even as they fight to keep a grip.

Although nothing here quite matches the moving, life-in-five-minutes montage in Pixar’s “Up,” one swooping flashback sequence comes very close.

Ferreras is similarly frank, but heavy doses of humor and empathy, along with gorgeous hand-drawn animation, keep things from getting too morbid.

In its visionary dream and flashback sequences, the film becomes a comment on the rapidly diminished state of traditional animation.

The film doesn’t wallow in grief; it’s a thoughtful and nuanced portrait of a stage of life we often choose not to see.