Review: World Cup-winning goalie Emi Martínez gets animated in a slim, sweet documentary

I've mentioned the ongoing World Cup in a couple recent reviews (Garuda: Dare to Dream and Jim Queen), and here I am, about to talk about it again. It's a little ironic, since I don't watch sports. But I do watch movies about sports. I think I need the extra narrative structure to care about what's happening on the field/pitch/diamond/whatever. I don't have the time to follow a team's season and all the inner workings/personal arcs/yada yada. That isn't me.

So I like to dip my toes in with movies like the charming Emi Martínez: The Kid Who Stops Time, which is streaming on Netflix. This short-and-sweet documentary looks at the life and career of the Argentine national football team's 2022 World Cup-winning goalkeeper. (Per my Googling, he and Argentina are still in the running for this year's World Cup, too!) It follows his childhood discovery of his talent, his early days playing for the youth national team and Argentina, and the whirlwind of moving the England to further pursue his professional career.

From this doc, Martínez and his family seem like really lovely people. His parents, brother, wife, and various friends, teammates, teachers, and coaches appear to talk about his talent, his long legs, his kindness, and his shyness (he was basically in love with his wife for years before he finally managed to talk to her). I was particularly tickled by how easily his dad cries, both in recounting when Martínez left as a kid (he moved into a team dorm at 11 1/2 years old, and never lived at home again from then on) and recent successes. Another highlight: watching the various cast members recording their lines during the credits -- they all voice themselves!

Martínez gives all credit for his success to his parents, who worked hard to scrape by, living paycheck to paycheck to keep food on the table. While accepting an award, he says that the heroes he looked up too as a young, burgeoning soccer superstar weren't other goalies, but rather his parents. Part of his drive was to find the kind of financial success where his mom wouldn't have to work anymore. Genuinely sweet stuff.

The issue here is that this story isn't particularly interesting, or remarkable. This is something biopics and documentaries bump up against sometimes. There's a desire in the filmmaking business to tell the stories of those who are super successful and talented, to talk about where they come from, how they did it, etc. But not everyone's life is particularly narratively exciting. As wonderful as Martínez and his family seem, their story feels pretty normal. He's a kid who discovered a talent for soccer from a young age, played his way up to a professional level, had to wait on the bench for years, and finally got the chance to prove himself on the world stage, becoming one of the greats. Like, good for him, for real, but there's not much story meat to be chewed off the bone here.

That said, this doc kind of gets away with it by using animation to spice things up. A huge portion of this movie is animated, I think maybe more than half? And the animation is super cute, kind of going for a comic strip look that reminded me a little of Little Nicholas - Happy as Can Be. Everything is rendered with color and fun cartoony twists, including Martínez's titular power. He's shown as a kid discovering a switch in his belly button. When he flips it, time slows down, which obviously proves to be a handy power for a goalkeeper. Equally clever is the film's very animated antagonist -- the talking soccer ball -- who constantly taunts and teases a he soars toward the net.

This approach to the story gives it a lot of gas, and makes even the fairly mundane proceedings more interesting to see/hear about. It's not enough to make this a slam dunk (to mix sports metaphors), but it certainly gives it a nice shine.