89th Academy Awards - 26th February 2017
The contenders: Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, My Life as a Courgette, The Red Turtle, Zootopia
The winner: Zootopia
The rightful winner: Moana
The barrel-scraper: None
Other Notes:
2017 was a funny old year in that, as with the 2016 ceremony, I thought that all of the nominees for Best Animated Feature were strong but, unlike 2016, the prize wound up going to the film that I personally considered the weakest of the five. Apologies to all you Zootopia fans (or Zootropolis, to my European readers) who champion the film as being right up there with Disney's elite, but for me this was one of the more middling entries from Nu-Renaissance Disney - enjoyable enough, but I honestly didn't love it. Zootopia's victory had, nevertheless, struck me as a foregone conclusion. Using the formula I devised in 2015, I figured that it and Moana were the only two entries that reasonably stood a chance here (although Laika probably had a smidgen more hope than in previous years, given that Kubo and the Two Strings had pulled off the impressive feat of becoming only the second animated film to be nominated for Best Visual Effects, after The Nightmare Before Christmas) and I suspected that Zootopia would ultimately have the edge because a) it made the bigger splash at the box office and b) the whole topicality thing. Zootopia came about at a time when people were starting to feel a mite uneasy about where the world might be headed in light of recent developments, and its attempts to depict interspecies tensions as a metaphor for our own human social prejudices had struck quite a chord back in early 2016.
I'll give Zootopia points for trying. It certainly tries to be smarter than your average anthropomorphic animal flick and consider the ramifications of how a universe populated by humanised animals would actually function, but I'm not sure if it succeeds. For one thing, I'm not a fan of the "mammals only" approach. Really, what's so special about mammals, other than that they tend to be more plush-friendly than most other creatures (with the exception of penguins of course)? There are also no domestic dogs or cats in this world, supposedly because it's meant to be an alternate universe where humans never existed and selective breeding was never a thing. Okay, fine. So why are there sheep then? The film deals with the most obvious question the premise raises - if the predators don't eat the prey animals, then what do they eat? - by not addressing it altogether. And if the predators no longer eat meat, then why are they even called predators? Aren't they bothered by the fact that the word "predator" has other, far more unpleasant connotations? And what of the creatures that fit both bills, like the shrews and the weasel? I also think that the film's social allegory - for which it won so much praise and, as noted, was probably the deciding factor in it taking home the final glory - is clumsily applied, largely because the film can't seem to decide whether the predators are the top brass or the victims of this particular society (in practice, it seems me to me that an animal's status in this universe is largely determined by how big and physically powerful they are - the whole Mr Big thing notwithstanding). Zootopia is a film with lofty ideas that ultimately bites off more than it can chew.
So yeah, apologies to all you Zootopia fans, but I am a card-carrying member of Team Moana. For me, Moana is the modern Disney film to best capture the fun and excitement of the 90s Renaissance while redressing many of that era's shortcomings and making the formula feel fresh and updated. I'll confess that, prior to Moana, my feelings toward Musker and Clements were not especially charitable. As far as I was concerned, their glory days came to a screeching halt when they made Hercules (easily the worst film of the 90s Renaissance), after which they never succeeded in regaining their footing. I love Moana so much that I've quite forgiven Musker and Clements for Hercules and I am genuinely looking forward to seeing what they'll do next (assuming that they do have another project in the pipeline). And I don't mean to turn this into a Hercules whipping session (I did just state that I was pretty much over that, after all) but I'm convinced that the major reason why that film failed is because Musker and Clements' hearts just weren't in it, and it showed - it is a well-documented fact that they made Hercules solely because they needed to appease Disney with one more surefire hit before Katzenberg would allow them to start work on their passion project, Treasure Planet (that didn't exactly work out for them either, but that's another post for another time). The real issue with Hercules has less to do with its lack of fidelity to Greek mythology (although I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a tad cheesed off that they made Hades the bad guy and basically conflated him with Satan) than with its very transparent lack of passion for the stories it's drawing from - to Disney's Hercules, Greek mythology was merely a resource to be pillaged; to be ground up and spat out into something that's like a hamburger (and yes, I stole that analogy from Sting - it's a goodun). It would be wrong to suggest that Moana isn't doing the exact same thing on some level, of course, and I wouldn't doubt for a moment that there are plenty of valid criticisms to be made about the film's handling of Polynesian mythology. Whenever Disney takes another culture and retools it into something they can package into your next Disneyland vacation, it inevitably walks a slippery tightrope. But you know what? I could believe that Musker and Clements genuinely cared about bringing this particular story to life. Moana is a film with a great deal of heart; heart for its characters and heart for its setting. The voice cast are on fine form, the animation is beautiful and the soundtrack is disarming in that most euphoric pop-Broadway Disney tradition. The story does hit a number of familiar Disney beats, but it never feels phoned in, thanks in part to its toothsome affection for the strange and eccentric.
On that note, Moana has Tamatoa, and that counts for a heck of a lot. Forgive me if I completely orgasmed over this character back in late 2016, but Tamatoa is a crab who's voiced by one half of Flight of The Conchords and is based on David Bowie - ie: they combined three of my all-time favourite things into a single character; how was I not going to lap that up? (The Bowie influence was a particularly lovely touch - I was reminded of how Ursula's character in The Little Mermaid was a tribute to Divine, who died in 1988). Right after seeing Moana, I ran all the way to my nearest Disney Store, having decided that the one thing I really needed in my life was a Tamatoa plushie...only to get there and discover that no such product existed; in fact, Tamatoa got hardly any merchandise at all. Oh, but they had plenty of stuff featuring that Pua pig, who was really little more than a glorified extra (we don't even learn if Pua is a boy pig or a girl pig in the movie proper - I only refer to Pua as a "he" because the Moana colouring book does). Yeah, if I had one real nitpick with Moana straight off the bat it was that Pua's entire presence kind of bugged me - in that he was blatantly a leftover from an earlier version of the script that no one could quite bring themselves to sever because he was the most merchandise-friendly thing they had going (it's strange that Maui is shown holding Pua in the promotional poster, when the two characters never actually meet). Truthfully, though, I find it impossible to hold a grudge against something so wretchedly adorable in the long term. The pig is alright with me now.
Kubo and The Two Strings felt like Laika's most ambitious production to date, and it paid off very handsomely (in artistic terms, that is; tragically, the film sank like a stone at the box office). It looks phenomenal, and that nomination for Best Visual Effects was very well-deserved. But if you ask me, the entry leading the way in terms of sheer artistic merit would have to be the Wild Bunch/Ghibli co-production The Red Turtle, which is absolutely breath-taking. Every individual frame of animation in this film had me positively salivating. And it's such a lovely, haunting tale on top of that, dispensing with dialogue to tell the story of a lone shipwreck survivor who finds himself stranded on an island (one which fortunately has a steady crop of avocados) and, unable to escape, slowly comes to terms with his predicament thanks to his relationship with a very unusual turtle. Some moments will have you sobbing your heart out, others are genuinely shocking. In particular, there's a sequence early on in the film where the lead character winds up in an extremely perilous situation that will make your guts writhe just watching. It's an utterly sublime film, yet in some respects not for the faint of heart, combining the beauty and tranquility of its island setting with all the fear, frustration and overwhelming loneliness of a lost soul faced with the likelihood of spending the rest of their life there.
The final nominee, the Swiss-French stop motion feature My Life as a Courgette (or My Life as a Zucchini, to my American readers), focuses on the camaraderie between a group of kids living in a children's home, each having to deal with their own parental loss or abandonment while finding a renewed sense of purpose and identity. It gets my vote for the most emotionally devastating of the five; I'm not exaggerating when I state that I was an absolute wreck by the time the credits started rolling. The animation has a beguilingly colourful charm, reminiscent of pre-school television but with a distinctive, tell-tale roughness to the edges that accentuates the central theme of youngsters who've already witnessed far too much within their short time on Earth. There's a lot of darkness in this film, yet it stays largely beneath the surface (if your kids can read a Jacqueline Wilson novel without feeling too unsettled, then they can probably also cope with the depictions of child abuse and neglect included here); ultimately, it is a hopeful story about characters learning to survive and find their way through trauma and/or bereavement. It is a deceptively small picture (only 66 minutes long) which nevertheless encompasses a great deal of emotional weight, and for that I think it will endure as a favourite among fans of less conventional animations.
The Snub Club:
Pixar's Finding Dory failed to make the cut, which took a few online journalists by surprise, but I think it should be obvious by now that the Academy doesn't think too highly of Pixar's recent descent into sequelitis and has tendency to punish them whenever their contribution for the year is an attempt to expand on one of their established properties (we'll see if The Incredibles 2 fares any better in light of recent changes to the voting process). Back when Finding Dory was first announced, my hopes for the project weren't exactly high, because a) it was very transparently being played as Andrew Stanton's Get Out of Director Jail Free card after that whole John Carter debacle (Stanton himself was quite upfront on this point), b) in the original Finding Nemo Dory's family were brought up purely as the basis of a throwaway gag that I never had any interest in seeing expanded on and c) doing a sequel where you place your comic relief character at the centre never struck me as a particularly good idea. But in the end I liked the film just fine and I'm glad that it exists. It's not a perfect film - it takes a while to get going and that sequence in which our fishy friends are implied to have crossed the entire Pacific Ocean in the blink of an eye (???) is just lazy writing, but once we arrive at the marine institute it does pick up considerably. Was I sore that it didn't make the Oscar cut? Nah - although I do like Finding Dory I can see why it perhaps didn't stand out enough when stacked up against the five contenders above. It's a good film, but it's not really boundary-pushing in the way that the best Pixar films are. It tells a nice, sweet, heartfelt story of the kind that we've seen many times before from Pixar without adding anything amazingly new or different to the mix. I also think the film is somewhat hampered by the necessity of having Marlin and Nemo limp along for the ride, despite the story barely involving them for much of the time.
Meanwhile, 2016 was a busy year for the pimply upstarts at Illumination, who released two pictures, The Secret Life of Pets and Sing!, both of which were trumpeted with such aggressive promotional campaigns that there was no escaping the damned things wherever you were on Earth. The first of these, The Secret Life of Pets, was as cynical and shallow a venture in animated film-making as they come - a film less concerned with constructing a meaningful and coherent story than with shaking the merchandising stick for all it was worth. A few of the mirco skits glimpsed in the teaser (notably, Leonard the head-banging poodle) did had have a winsome kind of charm to them, and I came away thinking that they might have gotten a really excellent film out of the concept had they only managed to make it eighty minutes shorter. As it happens, The Secret Life of Pets is the modern-day animation to most remind me of the Fleischers' 1941 film Mr Bug Goes To Town, in that it plays like a short film extended to feature length by way of a truly insane amount of padding. In place of a strong, well-structured narrative, The Secret Life of Pets substitutes an unsightly tangle of paper-thin story threads, all of which essentially just fart around until the third act, when it suddenly seems to dawn on the film that, "Oh yeah, we probably should start building toward a climax now." Films with meandering plots that are basically little more than string of loosely-connected sketches CAN work - think Monty Python and The Holy Grail - but The Secret Life of Pets certainly doesn't pull it off, perhaps because the characters themselves just aren't that fun to fart around with. Most of the supporting pets wind up being entirely useless and disposable (the pug, the dachshund, the cat and the budgie being the biggest offenders), but then their raison d'être was never really to service the plot but to shift plush toys and cereal boxes (incidentally, the one character whose scenes I actually rather enjoyed was the one apparently not considered important/marketable enough to be featured in any merchandise, and that would be the hawk voiced by Albert Brooks). It doesn't help that the two main dogs are among the worst leads I've ever seen in a children's film, in that they're both really, really unpleasant characters in general. A number of critics likened their dynamic to Woody and Buzz from Toy Story and that's kind of true...had Woody been the self-indulgent dick that Katzenberg had pushed for him to be and Buzz a complete and utter sociopath. Sadly, this odious doggy bag made an absolute killing at the box office, so we could be in for endless sequels featuring these quadrupedal tossers yet.
Compared to The Secret Life of Pets, Sing! is A Star Is Born...and not a disagreeable film on its own terms either. I have no love for the entertainment genre it's spoofing (nor do I give out praise easily to Garth Jennings - I still feel some lingering bitterness for his disastrous treatment of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy back in 2005), but it juggles the multi-stranded narrative format a lot better than The Secret Life of Pets, and the characters are all basically likeable. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of emphasis on the film's mixtape soundtrack; Sing! takes it for granted that its audience will appreciate a pop/rock shout-out for entirely its own sake, resulting in a number of awkward moments where it feels as if there should be some kind of punchline, but I'm just not grasping it. (I can see the relevance of having a frog sing "Jump" and a beaver sing "Nine To Five", but what exactly is the joke in having a kangaroo sing "Safety Dance"? Is there a joke? Or how about a giraffe singing "Ben"? Is it that such a large animal would be singing a song about such a tiny one? I'm assuming Jennings did appreciate that that song is about a boy and his pet rat when he decided to have a giraffe perform it?) Still, there's not a whole lot I can really complain about here. Sing! is easy the strongest entry I've seen so far from Illumination, and yet it made less money than Pets because a) life isn't fair and b) that whole Star Wars thing was playing in multiplexes at around the same time.
After scaling back considerably in 2015, DreamWorks Animation released two pictures in 2016 - one of them the third installment to one of their better brainchildren, the other a peculiar attempt to revitalise a kitschy nostalgic toy line comprised of plastic creatures with long fluffy hair, which may or may not have been inspired by the success of the latest My Little Pony revival. Back in late 2016, I made no attempt to hide my general sniffiness toward Trolls - I wasn't overly sold on the new character designs, but most of my snootiness was targeted at the film's voice cast. It wasn't universally bad, and I'm not knocking the likes of Anna Kendrick or Rhys Darby, but when I see endless bus ads informing me that Russell Brand, James Corden and Justin Timberlake are all amassing together in the same feature, my gut instinct tells me to run the other way fast. Nowadays, however, I've actually learned to feel entirely well-disposed toward Trolls, simply because it happens to be the favourite film of both of my nieces, and few things can soften your heart toward a movie quite like seeing how much joy it brings the little ones in your bloodline. (Having said that, on the last occasion I went to visit my nieces, I discovered that, to my deepest, darkest horror, they had discovered the Madagascar movies and, well, there are limits, you know!)
Meanwhile, Blue Sky released Ice Age: Collision Course, the fifth installment in the ridiculously protracted franchise that had long been their go-to for a reliable hunk of box office revenue (overseas, anyway). This year, their luck might just have finally run out, for Collision Course straight-up bombed in the US, and the foreign box office, while not altogether terrible, still represented a significant come-down from previous Ice Age films. Well, what can you say, people just got tired of seeing that stupid squirrel wrestle with an acorn ad nauseam. Unfortunately for Blue Sky, they've kind of always depended on the Ice Age cash cow to keep them afloat, since none of their other films (aside from Rio) have ever made that much of a dent at the box office, so it will be interesting to see how they weather this little setback. Personally, I doubt that this will kill off the Ice Age franchise completely, although I think there may be more of a shift toward smaller DTV projects. Truth be told, Collision Course is pretty inoffensive for the most part, and nowhere near as awful as Continental Drift (they got rid of that time-wasting mole-hedgehog hybrid, which is a step in the right direction), but the world could have lived without it.
R-rated crass com Sausage Party apparently fancied its chances as a serious Oscar contender - Sony Pictures gifted it with a lavish awards campaign, on the basis that, "Academy members...want to recognise bold, original and risky breakthroughs." I was never entirely certain if they were being serious or not. Regardless, Sausage Party always struck me as being far more smug and pleased with itself than it had any cause to be. It was a film based purely on novelty, and the trailer had already taken its central joke (it's like Toy Story, but with talking junk food!) about as far as it could go. Honestly, the fact that the trailer was accidentally played before a screening of Finding Dory felt like the best possible punchline to this entire conceit in itself - lord knows, we didn't need the actual film to exist on top of that. If I wanted a freaky CG feature that takes on organised religion and champions sexual liberty...I've already got Happy Feet, thanks.
Afterword:
When I started this retrospective, my initial thoughts were that I might conclude by ranking all of the winners to date from Best to Worst. That was when I hoped that I might get it finished before the 90th Academy Awards (which was always extremely ambitious of me, and became damned near-impossible once I'd added The Snub Club section). Now that that ceremony has been and gone, I figure that I might as well wait until I've covered the 2018 nominees, so that I can include Coco in my list. Unfortunately, that'll all have to be put aside until I've had a chance to see The Breadwinner, and for now I can't say when that will be. We'll wrap this up at a later date - in the meantime, revisiting so many animated features has certainly been exhausting, but a lot of fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment