79th Academy Awards - 25th February 2007
The contenders: Cars, Happy Feet, Monster House
The winner: Happy Feet
The rightful winner: Happy Feet
The barrel-scraper: I'm tempted to say Cars. But maybe that's just mean.
Ah, now this is a result which caused quite a bit of upset back in the day. Most people expected Cars to win and were gobsmacked when the award instead went to the film about the tap-dancing penguin which my friends and I at the time thought looked quite naff. That being said, not many people actually liked Cars, at least compared to other Pixar titles. The merchandise was a big hit with the littlies, but the film quickly garnered a reputation as Pixar's weakest and got a ton of unfavorable comparisons to Doc Hollywood (a 1991 Michael J Fox vehicle that I'm surprised enough people actually remembered). But everyone still expected Cars to triumph because it was Pixar, and after two wins in a row Pixar were now recognised as Academy favourites. Its loss created an awkward rift in what would otherwise have been a perfect winning streak for every Pixar release from Finding Nemo to Toy Story 3.
Personally, I find the whole notion of a universe populated by intelligent automobiles to be inherently unappealing, even a tad sinister, seeing how it inadvertently suggests a world where machines have displaced man (a Volkswagen with a mind of its own? If that isn't scary I don't know what is!). From the teaser, I'd assumed this would be more like Toy Story, where the cars lived in the "real" world alongside humans and became animated when they weren't around. An alternate world made up of talking cars, though? That's just crazy! Perhaps if I shared John Lasseter's obsession with the titular object I'd be more at home here, but to me the car is just a boring functional item, nothing more (not that that should be the deciding factor - a good film should draw you into its world and make you care, regardless of whether you're a hobbyist or not).
Whatever the sins of the original, the UK release was made a hundred times worse because Jeremy Clarkson was in it. In the original US version of the film, Lightning McQueen's perpetually off-screen agent Harv was voiced by Jeremy Piven, best known for playing Ari Gold in the HBO series Entourage, but in the UK he was swapped out with that other Jeremy who presented Top Gear (at the time). I touched on this kind of needless localisation, briefly, in my coverage of the 2005 awards, and you might have detected that I'm not a fan of it. At any rate, I've rarely seen it done well. In Shrek 2, where two minor characters voiced by US celebrities were re-dubbed with the voice-overs of UK celebrities, it was implemented very clumsily and with little to no attention to preserving the integrity of the original joke (why anyone thought it was a good idea to replace Joan Rivers with Kate Thornton in the role of Joan-freaking-Rivers is absolutely beyond me). Here, I can at least see the relevance of inserting Clarkson into a film about automobiles, but my appreciation for the in-joke is hindered by the fact that I have such a strong dislike of Clarkson and find myself automatically adverse to anything that serves mainly to pander to his ego. (Actually, a quick glance at Piven's Wikipedia page would suggest that he's perhaps not the most desirable name to have associated with family friendly entertainment at this point in time. But then neither is John Lasseter.)
But enough about Cars - let's take a look at our winner. Happy Feet was directed by George Miller, best known for the Mad Max series (his switch to family friendly fare with cuddly-looking animals isn't entirely unprecedented, given that he also wrote and produced Babe) and was the debut feature animation project from Australian visual effects company Animal Logic, who would later go on to animate The Lego Movie and its various sequels/spin-offs. After seeing Happy Feet, I was immediately sorry that I ever dismissed it as naff. Happy Feet is too hypnotically, mind-bogglingly weird to be dismissed as anything. Whatever naffness it might have it flaunts proudly on its sleeve; it's a film that marches very much to the beat of its own drum, and you find yourself warming to it, no matter how loopy the curves it throws at you. I caught myself getting annoyed during a scene where a leopard seal threatens Mumble with the line "I'll take you with ketchup!" (mate, you're a leopard seal living out in Antarctica, how do you know what ketchup is?), and had to remind myself that there's also a penguin who's somehow able to channel Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five and that Mumble's parents may be the literal reincarnations of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe (they're even called Memphis and Norma Jean, in case you didn't get the allusion). I quickly learned not to question this film's unique brand of (Animal) Logic.
The film's premise - a young emperor penguin who prefers to dance rather than sing is made a pariah by his society, when his talents are deemed to be in violation of their proud traditions - sounds daft on paper but makes sense in context. Penguin society is played as an analogy for organised religion, with the penguins using song as a means of appeasing their deity, and Mumble's unconventional approach quickly marks him out as a threat (it's not hard to read Mumble's knack for dancing as a LGBT metaphor - the film readily lends itself to such an interpretation in a scene where Mumble takes a stand against his father's attempts to explain away his differences as a biological abnormality). Happy Feet also has a message about the impact of human activity on the rest of the natural world, which is conveyed, wittily, as a sort of inversion on Close Encounters of The Third Kind, where humans are the mysterious and ominous invaders with whom Mumble longs to make contact (from my understanding, earlier versions of the script were a lot kookier and involved the penguins facing off against literal extra-terrestrials, a plot thread that was apparently dropped quite late into production). In scenery terms, Happy Feet is a really good-looking film, although I have to admit that I wasn't overly charmed by the character animation, the combination of photo-realistic penguins with humanised expressions striking me as just a little too shuddersome. As it stands, Happy Feet is one of the stranger films to have taken this award - I've no doubt that it would have been smashed had it gone up against a stronger Pixar entry, but it's surprisingly disarming stuff, and very worthy of its crown.
The third entry forgotten in all of this was Amblin Entertainment's Monster House...which if you ask me is pretty darned underrated, even if it isn't exactly pretty. I've mentioned previously that I'm no fan of Robert Zemeckis and his super-freaky experiments with motion capture, so it's somewhat ironic that I feel as positively about this film (which was animated at Zemeckis's studio, ImageMovers) as I do. I'm still not sold on the technology, mind - Monster House at least has a more stylised aesthetic than The Polar Express, with the characters bearing a pleasing resemblance to stop motion figures, although they still have something of the uncanny valley in them, and some of the designs seem really off (one character, Bones, whom I'm guessing is supposed to be a teenager, looks about 47). Story-wise, it's refreshing to have a CG family film that goes for old-fashioned spooks (in a manner reminiscent of 1980s kids' entertainment) over wacky, fast-paced comedy, and Steve Buscemi is fun as a creepy, Gollum-esque neighbour who's become the subject of local urban legend. Also curious are the vague plot similarities with Pixar's Up, which was still three years away; both involve a cranky old man who's struggling to come to terms with the loss of his wife, whose ghostly memory has become consolidated (in this case all too literally) with a building that won't be pinned down. Not for nothing do I think of Monster House as the twisted, Basket Case-esque twin brother of Up.
The Snub Club:
DreamWorks Animation found themselves pariahs yet again, with Over The Hedge failing to generate much of a stir among the public and the Academy alike (box office-wise, this was one of DreamWorks' weaker performers). There were a few enthusiastic souls who proclaimed it to be the studio's best feature since the original Shrek...which was probably true, but might tell you something about just how dire a lot of their output had been within those five years, because Over The Hedge is as forgettable and vanilla a DreamWorks animation as they come. Broadly, it repeats the Madagascar formula of shoving a bunch of wacky, celebrity-voiced animals into unfamiliar territory and racking up enough hi-jinks to fill 80-odd minutes, with the difference that the plot here is slightly more refined and the film actually has a vague idea of what it's about (feeding wild animals will turn them into unendearing backyard vermin, or something). Unlike Madagascar, it didn't leave me feeling homicidal, but then it didn't leave me feeling much of anything. I could take it or leave it.
Also in 2006, Blue Sky unleashed their first Ice Age sequel, in what would ultimately become one of the most insanely dragged-out franchises of modern times. Ice Age: The Meltdown does redress one area where the original was sorely lacking, in that it manages to include a female character who gets more than two lines, but other than that it's much the same parade of pointlessness in search of a plot that all of the Ice Age sequels intrinsically are. Paleontological inaccuracies have always been part and parcel with the Ice Age films, but that doesn't let them off the hook for basic plot implausibilities, and Meltdown has a particularly obtrusive one - the idea that this full-grown mammoth would seriously believe that she's a possum after all this time is a stretch, and has the effect of making Ellie look really, really stupid for much of the film. It's not the worst Ice Age sequel, not by a long shot, but it did make it plain that Blue Sky had nothing meaningful to add to what was already an extremely thin premise.
2006 also introduced a new player into the Hollywood animation game, as Sony Pictures Animation got in the fray with their debut feature, Open Season. The film has the distinction of being the first Hollywood CG animated feature to be helmed by a female director, Jill Culton, who co-directed with former Disney director Roger Allers, best known for rescuing The Lion King from Development Hell (and for sending Kingdom of The Sun, the troubled project that was eventually reworked as The Emperor's New Groove, plunging head-first into it). Unfortunately, Open Season itself doesn't live up to the excitement promised by such a directorial duo, being quite content to be another wacky buddy comedy featuring ugly, celebrity-voiced animals at a time when such films were ten a penny (see above). A docile grizzly bear raised in captivity is lured into the woods by a hyperactive deer, we get the inevitable "what does a bear do in the woods?" gag (in fact, I suspect the film was conceived entirely for the purposes of accommodating that one gag) and then...other wacky hi-jinks ensue. By now you could connect the dots yourself.
Meanwhile, indie animation was by now also hungry for a slice of the CG pie, and one of the early results was Kanbar Entertainment's Hoodwinked!, distributed in 2006 by The Weinstein Company (also not something you want associated with family entertainment at this point in time). The film was reportedly made on a budget of less than $8 million, and more than anything it proved that CG is not a toy you want to be playing with unless you have the means of making it look good, because Hoodwinked! is not at all easy on the eyes. Story-wise, its attempts at giving Little Red Riding Hood the Rashomon treatment are reasonably creative, and enough to keep it from seeming like just another Shrek clone, but the deal-breaker would be the jaw-droppingly clumsiness with which it telegraphs its plot "twist" a mile away (hmm, I wonder who could the culprit be? Surely not that otherwise entirely pointless character they keep shoehorning into every segment?) I complained about Corpse Bride for making its own "twist" too obvious, which may have been a mite unfair of me, as I'm not massively convinced that Burton's film really intends it to be that big a shock, and there it honestly doesn't make a huge difference to the story either way. Here though, it really comes off as the film having a low estimation of your intelligence.
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