Through the eyes of a child

The dark horse in the animated-feature Academy Awards race, “Boy and the World,” by Brazilian filmmaker Alê Abreu, looks and sounds nothing like its competition.

Hand-drawn using a mixture of colored pencil, photo collage and paint — and seemingly drawing inspiration from the character stylings of cartoonist Saul Steinberg — it’s the story of a small boy who discovers the big world when he goes in search of his migrant-worker father.

Set to a jazzy score by Ruben Feffer and Gustavo Kurlat, “Boy and the World” tells its story — at times wondrously, and at times with an awe approaching uneasiness — wordlessly. The dialogue, if that’s the right word, is gibberish that sounds like Portuguese played backwards.

It is, without a doubt, the most purely visual of the Oscar-nominated animated films, despite a hero whose face resembles little more than an oversize shirt button with two long, slit-like holes for eyes.

That we see the world through those eyes — everything from a rainbow-colored pebble to the factories that mill cotton fabric for shirts that are shipped to customers around the world — only adds to the sense of amazement and bewilderment that the film inspires. It also contains a critique of environmental degradation, income inequity and globalization, in an approach at once subtler and more powerful than similar mainstream children’s films (e.g., “Norm of the North” and “The Lorax”).