90th Academy Awards - 4th March 2018
The contenders: The Boss Baby, The Breadwinner, Coco, Ferdinand, Loving Vincent
The winner: Coco
The rightful winner: The Breadwinner
The barrel-scraper: The Boss Baby, Ferdinand
If you logged onto social media on 23rd January 2018, shortly after the nominees were announced for the 90th Academy Awards ceremony, you might have noticed that the nominees for Best Animated Feature were subjected to an unusual amount of ridicule. I got in on that (kind of) when I declared it to be the worst line-up since the 2012 ceremony. With hindsight that may have been a mite unfair of me. Certainly, I do not think the line-up here is quite comparable to that of the 2012 awards, in which the majority of entries were the kind of mediocre fare that would have certainly been passed over in a stronger year. Here, that's not the case, because three out of the five nominees are absolutely outstanding. Coco, Loving Vincent, The Breadwinner - all terrific. No, I think it's more about the fact that there were two very egregious nominees in there, each exemplifying Hollywood at its most soullessly mediocre. DreamWorks' Animation's The Boss Baby was on the receiving end of nearly all of the ridicule, with many taking the internets to proclaim their disbelief that the film was now officially up Oscar consideration, although I'll wager that a good percentile of the people dispensing such mockery hadn't even seen the film and were just chiming in on the basis of the trailer, which made the film look mindless as fuck. Which is not to say that The Boss Baby is actually good, mind, or smarter than its trailer would suggest, but at the same time I can understand why some people might enjoy it, on the basis that it is so mindless, stupid and anything-goes that it scores points as an alternative to heavy hallucinogenics (I fessed up to liking Rock-a-Doodle, so I'm hardly one to judge). An Oscar contender, though? Get out.
The second mediocre entry was largely ignored in all of this, presumably because Ferdinand itself attracted virtually no attention during its ill-fated run at the holiday box office (it chose to open on the exact same day as The Last Jedi; what the hell did it expect?). But to me it actually stuck out as the more glaring example, because while DreamWorks Animation have never really had much clout when it comes to winning this award, Blue Sky have been dead to them since almost as far back as the award began. And now suddenly the floodgates were re-opened to them, and for Ferdinand of all films. Ferdinand was Blue Sky's first film to be nominated for this award since the studio's debut feature, Ice Age, all the way back in 2003, so if you hadn't been keeping up with their output you might take that to mean that Ferdinand was their strongest film in a while. Erm, no. Ferdinand is as boring, safe and vanilla as Blue Sky gets - there is literally nothing about it that conveys any growth or development as a studio since the days of Robots and Ice Age 2. Rio and Epic, while not Pixar-worthy efforts, did at least have more character and ambition going for them than Ferdinand.
If I seem particularly hard on Ferdinand, it's because I desperately wanted for it to have been better. If nothing else, then Ferdinand does have an enormously positive message, one that you don't tend to see a whole lot of in Hollywood, period (given that it's making a statement on violence and toxic masculinity). A shame, then, that it doesn't have a strong story to back it up. It betrays what an inordinate amount of rewrites it underwent by just how awkwardly everything therein pieces together, from the odd, unconvincing manner in which a young Ferdinand is exiled from his ranch only to be hauled back within the first thirty minutes, to the curious lack of focus given to what the film keeps insisting is at heart of the story; that is, Ferdinand's relationship with his adoptive human family (we barely even see the people in question; the same goes for Ferdinand's passion of flowers, which here plays more like an incidental trait than anything especially pivotal to the character's motivations). There's one character who, much like Chief from Disney's The Fox and The Hound, was presumably killed off in earlier drafts of the script but lives in the finished film (somewhat implausibly) so as not to disturb the kids in the audience. And some of Blue Sky's very worst habits come creeping in yet again. Lupe the goat is the kind of tortuously annoying side character one encounters all-too-often in their productions (granted, it is unusual for the odious comic relief to be female, but that doesn't make Lupe any less unbearable). By comparison, the trio of crayola-coloured hedgehogs are cute and not overly intrusive, although they are the subject of an increasingly irritating running gag in which they're repeatedly mistaken for another species altogether and have to indignantly remind us that they are, didn't ya know, hedgehogs. The reason why this gag annoyed me so is because it was blatantly implemented on the assumption that American audiences might not recognise a hedgehog when they see one, given that they are not indigenous to the New World. Which is all well and good, but you have to remember that this particular story is set in Spain, and the Spaniards know damned well what hedgehogs are.
As previously noted, before the 2018 ceremony the Academy implemented a few changes to the voting process for Best Animated Feature, which animation news site Cartoon Brew predicted would make it easier for mainstream productions to hog the proceedings in future ceremonies. It seems that Blue Sky was indeed a beneficiary of these changes. Having said that, 2017 was kind of a weak year for Hollywood animation all-round, and it's not as if this award hasn't always had a very visible bias toward mainstream productions. So I'm not sure how much difference it really made in the end. In the (relatively short) history of this award, there have only ever been two nominees which I consider so soul-grindingly wretched that they had no business being invited to the Oscars in the first place, and they are Shark Tale and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (both which were nominated in the early years of the award, when the animation industry was still so small that pretty much all you had to do was show up). Everything else I could just about give the benefit of the doubt (I've got problems with Fantastic Mr Fox and Frankenweenie, but I can at least appreciate the craftmanship that went into those films on a technical level). But all the same, we have consistently seen quite a lot of mediocre entries get through, apparently on the basis that the Academy has to meet its quota for Hollywood representation before it can give foreign and indie flicks a look-in. Were The Boss Baby and Ferdinand's nominations really so egregious when you consider that Despicable Me 2, The Croods and Puss in Boots (and A Cat in Paris, just to prove that mediocrity isn't an exclusively Hollywood thing) were all nominated not so long ago? Perhaps it's more a case that we've been absolutely spoiled for great line-ups within the last two or three years. Perhaps. I guess we'll have to wait until the 2019 ceremony to see if this was merely a brittle year or if there are some worrying changes in the air. If the new rules mean that little-known gems like Boy and The World and My Life as a Courgette probably wouldn't be nominated in the future...well, that's a crying shame.
Of the three outstanding nominees, it was a tough call settling on my personal pick for rightful winner, because I think they're all pretty great. Coco is fun and heartwarming in the very best Pixar tradition and with it we have the magic and excitement of getting to explore an entirely new, freshly-realised world (I'm aware there was another animated film based around Dia de Muertos a few years back called The Book of Life, which I haven't seen so I can't compare how similar its treatment of the subject is to Coco, but certainly Coco looks and feels entirely different to every Pixar film before it). Loving Vincent, likewise, was a sublime experience from start to finish. But in the end I'm going with The Breadwinner. I came to it primarily for the gorgeous animation animation (courtesy of the ever-reliable souls at Ireland's Cartoon Saloon, along with Aircraft Pictures in Canada and Melusine Productions in Luxembourg), but I wound up getting so invested in the story and characters. I'm not exaggerating when I say there wasn't a single second in which I felt bored or my attention wandering, I was so on the edge of my seat the entire time wanting to know what would happen next. The Breadwinner does close on a very open-ended note, which might not be to all all tastes, but given the setting it would probably be a tad disingenuous to have gone with an ending in which everything was cut and dried. Am I surprised that it lost to Coco? Nah, I'm well-accustomed to how this whole process works by now. This was one heck of an easy outcome to call.
I am full of praise for Coco, although if I did have one nitpick with it (and be warned, we are getting into spoiler territory here) it's that if you didn't see the plot twist coming a mile away, you blatantly haven't seen enough Pixar. By now, it's a pretty solid rule of thumb that if a Pixar character is on the old side, patriarchal and widely respected then he's not to be trusted. Pixar do love their "surprise villains", but it's not really much of a surprise when they keep playing the same card over and over, now is it? Actually, check that - my main criticism of Coco is that I didn't much care for the means by which the villain's ill-deeds were made public knowledge...in that it struck me as reminiscent of how the villain's ill-deeds were made public knowledge in Zootopia, which itself borrowed heavily from how the villain in Monsters, Inc inadvertently gave themselves away. In all three cases, the resolution hinges on the villain conveniently choosing to blurt out the details of their nefarious schemes with no regard to who else might be listening, and the more that Disney and Pixar keep going back to this particular plot device, the less plausible I find it that the villain would actually be stupid or careless enough to fall for it.
The Snub Club:
A lot of people were sour because once again, and even with the revised voting process, the Lego movies (there were two in 2017) had zero joy in being nominated (note: this sourness was largely on behalf of The Lego Batman Movie, which many consider to be a pretty good movie, and not The Lego Ninjago Movie, which was widely dismissed as a hollow cash-in). Myself, I went to see The Lego Batman Movie with my parents and it was a bewildering experience all-round. Afterwards, when my dad said to me, "You know, that had a very odd message for a children's film. It seemed to be saying that good and evil need one another," I couldn't help but agree. What exactly was supposed to be the takeaway from that particular arc? But then it seemed to me that The Lego Batman Movie had a whole shit-ton of half-baked and broken morals. For example, am I the only one who felt sorry for all those non-Batman villains stuck in the Phantom Zone? Granted, they were bent on eating the Joker initially, but once he'd persuaded them to come over to his side they were 100% loyal to him, and the Joker repays their solidarity by ditching them the instant they cease to be of use to him. Then again, that's entirely in keeping with this particular Joker, who betrays the other Gotham City villains early on by turning them into the law, and then at the end of the film they all just welcome him back with open arms and his treachery is never brought up (I didn't see the Joker apologise to any of them, did you?). And to top it all off he flirts openly with Batman right in front of Harley Quinn. This Joker is a DOUCHE, man. That wouldn't be problem, except the movie kind of wants us to see the Joker as a victim and Batman as the one who's in the wrong. Huh. Although, speaking of so-called villains who were actually the victims of their particular narrative, what is King Kong doing in the Phantom Zone, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Voldemort, Saruman and every other iconic villain Warner Bros currently has the rights to? King Kong isn't a bad guy, he's just a big gorilla who behaved exactly as a giant gorilla would be expected to behave when you pluck it out of its natural habitat and chain it up to be gawked at by a bunch of slack-jawed yokels. As Homer Simpson so succinctly put it, "It's so unfair! Just because he's different!"
(Note: My mother agreed with me on King Kong. She was also upset that the shark from Jaws was in the Phantom Zone, pointing out that it's not his fault that he ate people, seeing as how he's a shark and he was only ever acting on instinct. You can see how this film inspired some spirited debate among my family.)
As for the two films I believe should have nominated in place of The Boss Baby and Ferdinand, that's a no-brainer - Japan's In This Corner of The World and Spain's Birdboy: The Forgotten Children were both excellent, and had those two made the cut instead then this would have been a nominees list to rival the line-up for the 2016 ceremony. That would have made Coco the sole mainstream Hollywood production in the running, however, so it was never going to happen. Again, I have to question how great a difference those changes to the voting procedure actually made for either of these films - non-Ghibli Japanese animations do have a very poor track record with this award (many thought that Your Name would be a shoo-in for the 2017 ceremony, yet it failed to scrape a nomination), so what chance did In This Corner of The World stand? Meanwhile, Birdboy was probably always too dark and demented for the Academy's tastes (since it's about animal drug addicts struggling to survive on an island ravaged by industrial disaster - not for nothing to do I refer to it as Threads meets Zootopia).
Not much else of note happened in 2017. Pixar did another Cars sequel (despite there being absolutely no demand for one) and once again I gave it a miss. Actually, I have heard that Cars 3 is a lot better than Cars 2, and that Cars 3 does everything in its power to make you forget there ever was a Cars 2. If that's really the case, then why did they call it Cars 3? Oh, and there was also something called The Emoji Movie which seemed to get everyone's bile boiling, but I'm still doing my darndest to ignore that one.
Afterward:
That's it for Animation Oscar Bite for now. We'll pick this up again after the 91st Academy Awards ceremony in 2019. Until then, and as promised, here's my personal ranking of all of the winners to date from best to worst:
1. Inside Out
2. Ratatouille
3. Up
4. Spirited Away
5. Wall-E
6. Coco
7. The Incredibles
8. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of The Were-Rabbit
9. Finding Nemo
10. Happy Feet
11. Frozen
12. Toy Story 3
13. Brave
14. Zootopia
15. Big Hero 6
16. Shrek
17. Rango
The most cheated film never to have won this award:
Still Monsters, Inc. My all-time favourite losing entry is Moana, but losing to Zootopia is somewhat less egregious than losing to Shrek.
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