Animation Oscar Bite 2018: The Remains of The Day

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.

Animation Oscar Bite 2017: The one where they all get rabies

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.

Animation Oscar Bite 2016: The Life of The Mind

88th Academy Awards - 28th February 2016

The contenders: Anomalisa, Boy and The World, Inside Out, The Shaun The Sheep Movie, When Marnie Was There

The winner: Inside Out

The rightful winner: Inside Out

The barrel-scraper: NONE. This is the purest line-up in the history of this award.

Other notes:

We all know that 2016 was an absolute horror show of a year, but one element which remained entirely spotless during our descent into the abyss was the list of nominees for Best Animated Feature. When I first laid sight upon this list, I could feel myself welling up from sheer euphoria. This is a phenomenally good line-up - there have been years where I'd thought that all of the nominees were at the very least worthy (the years where I wasn't able to single out any particularly obvious barrel-scraping entries), but 2016 is the only year to date where I''m able to look at the full list of nominees and say, without question, that yes, I love absolutely every one of these films and think that each has something truly unique and magnificent to offer.

Having said that, there was never any doubt in my heart as to which of the five I wanted to see triumph. There's some exemplary stuff going on among the foreign/indie entries in this list, but once again I found my allegiances siding unapologetically with the Hollywood juggernauts at Pixar. Inside Out was a welcome return to form for them following their creatively dry spell in the early 2010s, one which I'd say even surpasses the glorious Fountain Age of 2007 to 2009. Curiously, when 2015 began I recall a lot of people speculating that this would be Blue Sky's big year - that The Peanuts Movie would be the animated film that everybody talked about and would go on to win the Best Animated Feature Oscar at the 2016 ceremony. With hindsight, I find it amazing that expectations for Inside Out were apparently so low from the outset. The teaser trailer was very divisive, as it initially gave the impression that the film might be full of tired sitcom quips about gender stereotypes ("Did you ever notice how men always leave the toilet seat up? That's the joke!"), but I think that initially people just had a hard time wrapping their heads around how this particular synopsis was going to play out. Inside Out is based on a very abstract concept - certainly, it was Pixar's most ambitious and cerebral to date - and people either couldn't picture it or thought that it sounded more like the kind of educational tool a child psychologist would give to their patients than something that could captivate the multiplex set. In fact, when I'd first learned that there were two original Pixar films in development for the mid 2010s (amid the slightly worrying influx of sequels and prequels), I think that my interest initially gravitated a lot more toward The Good Dinosaur (the irony!) simply because there was so little to go on for Inside Out at the time. For a while, all we really knew was that it "took place inside the mind of a little girl", and how the hell was I supposed to get excited over something like that? I couldn't even begin to visualise it. A ploughman dinosaur at least gave my expectations something they could work with.

Then summer of 2015 came and Inside Out turned out to be something really very special. This was Pixar at the very top of their game - intelligent, heartfelt, willing to push boundaries and deftly capable of appealing to children and adults alike; kids will enjoy the colourful adventures of Joy and Sadness as they traverse the inner workings of Riley's mind, while adults will find additional resonance in the subtext about a waning childhood and the onset of adolescence. Given Pixar's track record, it was also refreshing to see them take such a female-centric route for a change - Brave had already claimed the distinction of being the first Pixar film with a female protagonist, but Inside Out was their first to have a female-majority cast. Of course, there were a few killjoys out there who insisted that this so-called Pixar "original" was actually a rip-off of a 1990s sitcom called Herman's Head (which I only knew existed prior because Lisa mentioned it in an episode of The Simpsons) or British comic strip The Numskulls (which I had encountered a few times in my childhood and recognised that Pixar's film shared a few superficial similarities with, although nothing which had me losing sleep), but I paid them no mind. It's true that there's nothing amazingly original about the whole "individual person is actually a composite of lots of little beings working behind the scenes" set-up - I mean, Woody Allen did an R-rated version in the final segment of his 1972 film Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask) - but Inside Out approaches the concept with such a deep, thoughtful sincerity (one that draws from the research of psychologist Paul Ekman) that takes it well beyond the realm of quirky novelty and gets to grips with some of the weightier implications of such a notion. And the film's message is an unusual one. Oh sure, there's no shortage of children's media that teaches that it's perfectly fine, normal and healthy to feel sad, scared, angry, etc, but I can't think of many others which go so in-depth in exploring how our emotions, even the ones we don't traditionally think of as desirable, enable us to function on a day to day basis, and to grow and develop as people. A real shame that that rumored Best Picture nomination never materialised; it was certainly a lot better than that film about the kid in the room.

I have to admit that I felt a wee bit nervous about Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa because I'd seen the "quirky Indiewood director makes the transition to stop motion animation" scenario before with Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox and I did not like the results one bit. But I think it worked out a whole lot better in Kaufman's case (partly because, due to the nature of the project, Kaufman has none of Anderson's smug pretensions about subverting a children's classic). I will say that Anomalisa possibly holds the record for the most misleading and unrepresentative trailer I've ever seen - it was structured around a phony-baloney motivational speech given by the film's protagonist, and all without the slightest hint of irony, making it look as if this would be an uplifting film about a middle-aged man who finds renewed purpose in life. If you came to Anomalisa hoping for something warm and life-affirming then you were sorely out of luck. Which is not to say that it's not an immensely moving experience. There's been a lot of discussion as to the meaning of the film's cryptic ending, and my own perspective would be that it has something to do with Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. I hesitate to say that, because you can literally explain away anything as having to do with Heaven, Hell or Purgatory (it's the second most annoying interpretation of Mulholland Drive, right after the "Betty's life was all a dream!" reading), but that is the symbolism I genuinely take from the film's closing sequences. At any rate, I'd do think there's a definite Heaven and Hell allusion with regard to the respective end points of the two main characters.

Elsewhere, The Shaun The Sheep Movie gave Aardman their strongest film in a decade (confession time: I never got into the Shaun The Sheep TV series, partly because I always found Shaun's canine sidekick to be inexplicably loathsome, so it's no small feat that I warmed to the film as much as I did), while Studio Ghibli scored another enchanting classic with When Marnie Was There. Back in 2014 there were a lot of rumors circulating that this would be Ghibli's final feature film, as the company had recently announced that it would be taking a break following Miyazaki's supposed retirement (although a lot of the "Ghibli is dead!" narrative seemed to spring more from what the Western media was reporting than any actual Japanese sources, which always made it seem slightly suspect to me). But nope, Miyazaki can never seem to stay retired for long, and there's currently a whole new Ghibli film in the works. A good thing too - a world without Ghibli would be an infinitely poorer one.

I was lucky enough to catch the final nominee, the Brazilian Boy and The World, back in 2014 when it was first making the film festival rounds; back then, I described it as a sort of combination of Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Susan Young's 1987 short film Carnival, marrying the visual poetry and mounting chaos of the former with the colour and vibrancy of the latter. I love Koyaanisqatsi and I love Carnival, but even then I'm not sure if the comparison quite does it justice. Let's just say it's one of the most beautiful visual feasts I've ever had the pleasure of seeing on the big screen, and since 2014 I've been itching to revisit it, and frustrated by its lack of accessibility in my portion of the globe. There's also hardly any dialogue - which is handy, because the screening I attended did not have subtitles. Then again, I understand that the two or three lines of Portuguese dialogue that were there were actually rendered backwards...so if any kind soul can clue me in on what was said, I'd be thankful.


The Snub Club:

2015 was the first year in which Pixar released two features - in addition to Inside Out, we got The Good Dinosaur, which was bumped back from its intended 2014 release for an extensive last minute story overhaul. It is somewhat ironic that Pixar wound up releasing its best and its worst film to date within five months of one another, just to remind us of the heights they could soar to but also just how royally they could screw things up.* What works about The Good Dinosaur? Nothing works. It's a complete failure. It's such a wretched misfire from top to bottom that I don't even know where to begin in unpicking it, but let's go with this: I was reminded a lot of Rock-a-Doodle, in that, if you squint, you can just about make out the aborted story they had to manically overhaul at the eleventh hour. The opening sequence makes a point of establishing that we're in an alternate universe where the asteroid narrowly missed Earth and the dinosaurs never went extinct, and then the film proceeds to do sod-all with that particular scenario. Oh sure, humans and dinosaurs wind up inhabiting the same plane of existence, but then many fictional depictions of prehistory are happy to ignore paleontological accuracy anyway, and while the dinosaurs here are civilised enough to have gone into agriculture, it honestly doesn't feel any different to the kind of anthropomorphism you'd encounter in any animated critter flick. In the end, that opening sequence feels so irrelevant that it's easier to view it as the film's pivotal set-piece, the dinosaurs' disinterested reaction being the punchline, and the rest of the film as some random epilogue you can readily skip. On top of everything else, The Good Dinosaur was not made (or at least retooled) by people who seem particularly passionate about dinosaurs. Whereas Inside Out did a wonderful job in constructing a unique world and story around the fact that its main characters were personified emotions, The Good Dinosaur doesn't really delve much into the whole dinosaur theme. Heck, this exact same story could just as easily have taken place in contemporary New Zealand; make Arlo a sheep and Spot a possum and you'd have to change very little else about the plot.

There are many more bones I have to pick with The Good Dinosaur, but I'm conscious of length, so I'll restrict myself to just one more - at the end of the film, Arlo proves his manhood (dinosaurhood?) by killing a wounded enemy in the process of retreating. Holy shit, that's the kind of thing I would expect to see in one of those McBain parodies on The Simpsons, not played entirely straight in a Pixar film. Pixar, lads, whatever was up?

Meanwhile, following a recent string of box office meltdowns, DreamWorks Animation were at the point where they were having scale back a little; whereas their previous strategy was to release two or three features every year, 2015 saw only one - Home, which starred a purple alien thing voiced by Jim Parsons and..ugh, sorry DreamWorks, but you've already lost me there. Just bring on Kung Fu Panda 3 already.

Oh, and after all that early buzz The Peanuts Movie came and went and didn't leave much of a dent in the end. Critical reception was warm enough but on the whole people didn't seem to care or even notice that the film was there, and the international box office was pretty mediocre. Personally, I've still not seen it, though I'm told that it's respectful to its source and actually pretty good by Blue Sky's standards. Still, 2015 definitely wasn't Blue Sky's year, and 2016 wouldn't be much better - their flagship franchise was poised to crash and burn quite messily. Ah well, 2016 was a hard year on everyone, Blue Sky.

* Although keep in mind that I haven't seen Cars 2 or Cars 3. If those are worse than The Good Dinosaur then...oh dear.

Animation Oscar Bite 2015: Six Heroes In Search of a Yokai

87th Academy Awards - 22nd February 2015

The contenders: Big Hero 6, The Boxtrolls, How To Train Your Dragon 2, Song of The Sea, The Tale of Princess Kaguya

The winner: Big Hero 6

The rightful winner: Song of The Sea

The barrel-scraper: None.

Other notes:

The 2015 ceremony was another of the more controversial years in the history of this award, not so much because of what won as what wasn't nominated in the first place. If there was animated film that tapped into zeitgeist back in 2014, it was The Lego Movie. Many people expected the Warner Bros film, animated by Australian studio Animal Logic (previously of Happy Feet fame) and helmed by directorial duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller (previously responsible for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and at least one big screen take on a nostalgic TV show which the rest of the world loved but I absolutely despised), to lead the pack when it came to Oscar prospects at the start of 2015. Then the nominations were revealed and The Lego Movie hadn't made the cut at all. Imagine the fury on the internets! Many were so outraged that they declared total disinterest in how this year's feature animation award played out.

Among those who stuck around, there was some speculation that the Academy would give this to How To Train Your Dragon 2 on the basis that DreamWorks Animation had been having a really hard time of late and needed all the support they could get. A pity Oscar. For the company who had mopped the floor with Pixar in the historic first year of this award. How are the mighty fallen. (Besides, whatever the merits of How To Train Your Dragon 2, DreamWorks had put out Mr Peabody and Sherman in the very same year. They weren't getting any sympathy from me.)

Overall, most people seemed to lean in favour of DreamWorks tasting victory for the first time in thirteen years, if not out of pity, then because reigning champs Pixar did not release a film in 2014 (The Good Dinosaur was initially intended for a 2014 release but got pushed back due to story development issues), meaning that DreamWorks were free to compete without fear of being overshadowed by their long-time rivals. Personally, though, I didn't buy it. Not to come off as blowing my own horn, but I figured out well in advance that Big Hero 6 was going to come out on top here, and I was amazed that everyone else was apparently so gobsmacked on the night. I had been following this award for long enough to have more-or-less twigged how it tended to work right by now. And one of the first rules of thumb is that DreamWorks don't tend to get a whole lot of love from the Academy. They may have had an early victory in 2002, when Shrek beat Monsters, Inc, but it's evident that the Academy went off them in a very big way around the mid-00s, when it became rarer for their films to even land a nomination. Consider that DreamWorks haven't won this award since Shrek (not counting their win-through-association with Aardman's Curse of The Were-Rabbit in 2006). We all know that Pixar have dominated this award for so long that they've made it very hard for a number of other excellent films to have a look-in, but in DreamWorks' case I doubt that it's simply a matter of them being repeatedly cockblocked by the Academy's pet. The problem with the whole "DreamWorks will win as long as they don't have to compete with Pixar" narrative that everyone seemed to be clinging to in 2015 is that you didn't have go back terribly far - only three years, in fact - to find a precedent that proved exactly the opposite. The 2012 ceremony had nary a Pixar nominee in sight, and DreamWorks had not one, but two films in the running that year, and still they lost to the most random and dubious thing ever to have picked up this award. The fact that people had forgotten that speaks volumes about just how little investment there was in the 2012 nominees. Of course, it's entirely possible that DreamWorks lost because both of their entries that year were sequels (technically Puss in Boots is a spin-off, but close enough), and sequels, with one obvious exception, also don't tend to have much luck with the Academy - either way, the odds were not swinging in How To Train Your Dragon 2's favour.

Heck, you didn't need to go all the way back to 2012; Pixar didn't make the cut in the 2014 ceremony either, and DreamWorks still lost out to another old rival, Disney. Perhaps people didn't think much of it because it was one of DreamWorks' lesser offerings, The Croods, up against an absolute juggernaut in Frozen. At the time, Frozen was the only precedent for a Disney film winning this award (again, we we're not counting wins-through-association with their buddies at Pixar), but it was enough for me. The Academy had smiled favorably on a Disney animation only last year. They hadn't smiled favourably on DreamWorks in thirteen years. There were, of course, three other nominations from very respectable studios in the running - Cartoon Saloon, Laika, Studio Ghibli - but I'd learned by now that the Academy prefers to give this award to the big name studios. I decided that Big Hero 6 had to win this. And lo and behold.

(Yeah, I did say I wasn't going to blow my horn, but let me have this one. For once I got to experience the thrill of being the little guy no one listened to who proved to be remarkably prescient.)

As noted, by now I had been playing this game for long enough to have drawn up a formula. So without further ado I present to you Scampy's rules of thumb for determining a Best Animated Feature winner. Remember, these are only rules of thumb, not hard rules, so occasionally you might see some deviations, and particular trends identified here may be subject to change over time. For the time, though, I think the following pointers will generally prove quite reliable.

1) Follow that Luxo lamp, but consider what's on offer. There's a myth that Pixar always win this award. In reality, Pixar have a very strong track record, but the Academy does also have a tendency to punish them when they get it wrong. Pixar are unlikely to win with any of the following: films about talking cars, prequels and sequels (Toy Story 3 being a major exception), or a film so weak and misdirected in general that nobody even notices it's there (we're talking The Good Dinosaur levels of weak). In fact, such Pixar entries will often struggle to scrape a nomination.

2) Alternatively, follow the mouse. This one has taken a number years to materialise, chiefly because the award's genesis coincided with Disney's wandering off into the wilderness in the last crazy years under Michael Eisner, and it took them a long time to get back on course. But in recent years Disney have been building up a strong track record, and they now have the second highest number of wins for any studio in this category. Disney still have a way to go before they'll match Pixar's whopping total, but it's clear that the Academy feels favorably about them in their current state.

3) Don't back DreamWorks. Like, don't. DreamWorks Animation have only ever won once, in the very first year of the award. Back in the early 00s, when we were just coming out of Disney's 1990s Renaissance and feeling mighty bored with it, people found Shrek's cynicism (some would say spitefulness) refreshing, and it seems that the Academy were also won over by this in 2002. But in subsequent years, DreamWorks burned off a lot of that goodwill by wearing the same formula down to the ground, and much of what people responded to about the original Shrek - the hip cultural references, the in-your-face celebrity voiceovers, the gross-out fart gags - quickly came to seem obnoxious and pandering. To their credit, DreamWorks have attempted to develop and expand their output post-Shrek, with extremely mixed results, but the damage to their brand was clearly done. I'm not saying that DreamWorks can never win again, but they're not Academy favourites. (While we're at it, Blue Sky and Illuminations are also big names with a poor track record, but they seldom get nominated at all - recent changes to the voting process might give them an easier ride in the future, however.)

4) The little guys are bound to get stepped on. Hollywood bias plays an enormous role in determining who wins at the Academy Awards, and the Best Animated Feature award is no exception. To date, only one foreign language film, Spirited Away, has ever won this award. We've had a British winner (Curse of The Were-Rabbit) and an Australian winner (Happy Feet), but these both had the backing of a major Hollywood studio. Foreign films and films from smaller US studios rarely triumph because the Academy prefers to back the big name brands (plus, odds are that the people who actually vote on these things haven't even seen the smaller stuff). Laika, Cartoon Saloon and Studio Ghibli are responsible for some of the finest animated films in recent years, yet whenever you see them competing in this award they're usually just window dressing. Ah well, it's an honour just being nominated, right?

5) A wild card can win, but only in times of drought. Wild card winners in the past have included Animal Logic's Happy Feet and Industrial Light & Magic's Rango. Both of these were very atypical winners in many respects, not least because they were from animation studios without a big or established brand name. However, both of these films triumphed in years where the output of Hollywood animation in general was mediocre at best. As much as I love Happy Feet, I think it seriously lucked out in that the Pixar film it had to compete against was Cars.

6) Originality matters. To date, only one sequel, Toy Story 3, has ever won this award. Toy Story 3 was an exceptionally well-received sequel, of course, but it's also clear that the Academy isn't terribly impressed with how reliant Pixar have become on sequels and prequels in the aftermath and now has an established tendency not to invite them at all whenever they fail to turn in something original. DreamWorks have had more luck than Pixar in getting their sequels nominated, but as we've established, DreamWorks stopped winning a long time ago.

7) Be leery of internet hype. The bane of many a Wreck-It Ralph or Lego Batman Movie fan's existence - what goes down well with internet fan communities won't necessarily reflect what resonates with the Academy. In short, don't expect something to triumph on the basis of an enthusiastic following.

8) Topicality helps. I believe this is partially what gave Zootopia the edge at the 2017 awards. I'd note that films with an environmental message (Spirited Away, Happy Feet, Wall-E) also have a very strong showing here.

As to what I believe should have won the 2015 award, in an ideal world - Cartoon Saloon's Song of The Sea. I was blown away by it, for much the same reasons I was blown away by The Secret of Kells five years prior. Big Hero 6 was fine, although a bit on the vanilla side for Nu-Renaissance Disney. Though I liked it more than Wreck-It Ralph.


The Snub Club:

So, The Lego Movie - yeah, it was a lark, a joyful grab bag of non sequiturs with a surprisingly tender conclusion, and overall a lot better than most of us would reasonably have expected from a film called The Lego Movie. I suspect a key reason behind its lack of nomination was because, no matter how much admiration it garnered, it remained a feature film based off a popular toy line, and that's something I really don't see the Academy going for. I saw a number of sentiments along the lines of, "What is this sea princess crap I've never heard of and why was it nominated over The Lego Movie?", but personally I really appreciate that this category has consistently managed to acknowledge a broad range of animation styles, given smaller indie productions some due recognition and isn't necessarily guided by the flavour of the month (on the whole, I think the Academy have done a good job in selecting worthy nominees for this award, although that's something I fear may have broken down in light of recent changes) - besides, I still haven't forgiven Lord and Miller for the 109 minutes I lost on 21 Jump Street (did I mention how much I hated that film?), so I find it hard to feel terribly outraged on their behalf about this one. Nevertheless, it was a move which rubbed many people the wrong way, and The Lego Movie remains the most controversial snub in the history of this award.

I mentioned in point No. 3 that DreamWorks had been trying hard to broaden their output since the days of Shark Tale and Madagascar and in the past few years we had seen the full spectrum - How To Train Your Dragon is a great film, Rise of The Guardians is a noble failure and Mr Peabody and Sherman is a pretty sorry misfire. A well-intentioned but not very successful attempt to update Peabody's Improbable History, Jay Ward's mid-century low budgeter about a time-traveling beagle and his naive young human sidekick, it makes a number of well-intentioned but not very successful changes to its source, which I can comprehend without actually getting behind. Peabody and Sherman's relationship has undergone a big touchy-feely upgrade (remember what a bitch Peabody was to Sherman in the original cartoon?), Sherman is now explicitly Peabody's adopted son (in the original, Peabody regarded Sherman more as a pet) and the film attempts to play them off as some kind of metaphor for the modern family. I appreciate that this was all done in the interests of giving the film an emotional centre, but it comes at the expense of everything that made the characters' dynamic funny in the first place. Meanwhile, the attempts to turn Peabody into a hip and happenin' hound for the YouTube generation leave an inevitably sour taste, particularly at the start of the film when Peabody claims to have invented planking (I don't know about you, but for me that's more than enough evidence that he's an unfit guardian for Sherman).

DreamWorks' third offering of the year was The Penguins of Madagascar, another spin-off in the Puss in Boots mold. If you've been following this retrospective then you're aware of just how deeply I loathed that franchise's mother film. Of all the films I've dismissed and grumbled about along the way, I honestly can't say that I took the negative experience half as personally as I did with Madagascar (well, except maybe Frankenweenie). In the succeeding years I've made a point of steering well clear of the sequels, and yet I was actually prepared to give this one a chance, since I figured that it might be halfway tolerable minus those stupid zoo animals and that godawful thing voiced by Sacha Baron Cohen. And halfway tolerable is about right - the film moves at such a constant, breakneck pace that it never allows the story or the characters room to settle, but as a time-killing fluff piece it's agreeable enough. And I did get a laugh out of one gag involving a special agent squad of Arctic fauna called North Wind, whose battle cry is, "No one breaks The Wind!" Well, I've lost all credibility. Moving on...

Blue Sky decided to try their hand at spinning out another franchise to complement their Ice Age series, and maybe cash in on the 2014 World Cup while they were at it - hence, there was Rio 2. At one point, there was whisper about a Rio 3, but that has yet to materialise, and I'm not overly surprised because Rio 2 was a sequel with absolutely nothing to add to the original (other than increasing the genetic diversity of the blue macaws and removing the implication at the end of the first film that Blu and Jewel's children were ultimately forced to commit incest in order to keep their species alive). Can we talk about the fact that this film has no plot - or rather, that it has lots of teeny-tiny micro plots which have been stitched together in a messy, ugly patchwork of narrative dead-ends? It's a case of there being so much going on that in effect nothing very much is going on. Also, Blu and Jewel's offspring are a trio of properly brash little brats that you just want to see scarfed by an anaconda. Nice to see Jemaine Clement back as Nigel, but again, he has little to do other than wander around with a frog and an anteater and give a corrupted rendition "I Will Survive" at one point, and it's kind of obvious that he was shoehorned in precisely because he was one of the brighter things about the original.

Also in the sequels/weird spin-offs department, we had Planes: Fire & Rescue. I clearly owe the original Planes an apology because I plain forgot that it came out a year earlier in 2013. The mere existence of this series is somewhat interesting in that it's a spin-off of Pixar's Cars franchise, made not by Pixar themselves but by DisneyToon Studios, who were responsible for all those DTV Disney cheapquels which were a staple of supermarket aisles at the dawn of the millennium. Perhaps this is a glimpse into how Circle 7's films might have turned out had Disney and Pixar not been able to salvage relations in the mid-00s. I couldn't tell you if it's any good or not, because I've yet to have the pleasure of Planes. A spin-off based on Pixar's least appealing creation (well, back in 2014) by the same studio who made all those DTV Disney cheaquels never sounded all that enticing to me.

Animation Oscar Bite 2014: How Elsa Got Her Groove Back

86th Academy Awards - 2nd March 2014

The contenders: The Croods, Despicable Me 2, Ernest and Celestine, Frozen, The Wind Rises

The winner: Frozen

The rightful winner: The Wind Rises

The barrel-scraper: The Croods, Despicable Me 2

Other notes:

If you had any lingering doubts that Disney was on the verge of a brand new Renaissance (or hopes that they were not, if you were a 2D animation fan still yearning to see Disney put away the flashy new technology and return to their traditional hand-drawn roots) then those were certainly obliterated the instant you caught sight of the box office figures for their 2013 Thanksgiving offering. Despite being a darling with the internet nerds, Wreck-It Ralph was only really a moderate hit with the public. Tangled did better, but its freakishly high budget would have made it difficult for it to have broken even. Frozen, by contrast, was the kind of mega hit that loudly announced that Disney were back in fashion - nay, that they had birthed the kind of cultural phenomenon not seen since the middle point of their 1990s Renaissance days. Wherever you were on Earth in late 2013/early 2014, there was no escaping Frozen fever. It ate brains and consumed souls. A testament to how well Disney had finally adapted to modern sensibilities - Frozen celebrates sisterly love over romantic love, has a bad guy who doesn't wear his villainy on his sleeve, and has an LGBT subtext which, if not actually intentional, then doesn't seem like much of a stretch - or simply to how much of a killing you can make if you pen a catchy enough song? I'm convinced that a huge portion of Frozen's profits have to do with how enraptured people were with "Let It Go", which is real earworm (for the life of me, I can't remember any other songs from the film, aside from one of them having lyrics about sandwiches). But the film's certainly not bad in other respects. Frozen is, in many ways, a very traditional Disney film, yet also one which plays with familiar Disney convention and uses the viewer's expectations to its advantage. Disney had made a film which might be described as progressive - it would be nice if it had happened twenty-four years beforehand, of course, but better late than never.

As Oscar night drew nearer, most people were in agreement that Frozen would own this, securing Disney its very first victory since the award for Best Animated Feature began. This was all that Disney needed to demonstrate that they might one day reclaim their throne as kings of the animation industry. There were, however, a few dissenters who reasoned that the award might go to The Wind Rises, which Hayao Miyazaki had formally announced would be his last film before retirement (although he has since gone back on that, and not for the first time). I have to admit that by the time we got to March I was suffering from Frozen fatigue, and I would have been fine if the award had gone to The Wind Rises, which I considered the superior picture. Miyazaki's film has no annoying snowman sidekicks for a start (in fairness, Olaf was nowhere near as witless a creation as I figured he would be, and there is something endearingly tragic about his yearning to see summer, but I'm not sure I buy the bullshit means by which he ultimately escapes his fate - it happened to David Bowie's snowman friend, and I maintain that it should have happened here. As a bonus, we would have avoided the entire Frozen Adventure debacle). I had no delusions that the night would belong to anyone other than Disney, mind. Frozen had the Hollywood factor in its side, and plus not everyone felt comfortable about the subject matter of The Wind Rises, given that it's based on the life of Jiro Horikoshi, who designed fighter aircraft for Japan in World War II (though Miyazaki, a pacifist, puts the focus squarely on Horikoshi's passion for creation and the tragedy of how his talents were ultimately channeled).

Of the three entries which didn't have a snowball's, the strongest by far was La Parti Productions' Ernest and Celestine, a French 2D animation from directorial trio Stephene Aubier, Vincent Patar and Benjamin Renner, the former two of which had previously collaborated on the joyously bonkers stop motion comedy Panique au village (2009). Based on a series of children's books by Gabrielle Vincent, Ernest and Celestine tells the story of the mutually strained relations between the bears who inhabit a city and the sewer-dwelling rodents below, and two the titular dissenters who feel a sense of friendly fascination toward their foe (think One Stormy Night, except that it's actually good and doesn't have a weirdly sexual subtext). It's not quite as deliriously, endearingly deranged as Panique au village, but it is extremely endearing, and it has that sense of irresistible whimsy that A Cat in Paris was sorely lacking.

Frozen may have reached the dizzying heights of a cultural phenomenon, but 2013 was another weak year for Hollywood animation overall, and we did have two entries which, in the proud tradition of Jimmy Neutron, Brother Bear and just about everything from the 2012 awards, were blatantly just here to take up space. The first of these was DreamWorks Animation's latest, The Croods, a caveman pic which had a long gestation period, having started out as an Aardman project which DreamWorks were left holding when the studios parted ways in 2007, and which was ultimately inherited by ex-Disney director Chris Sanders when he joined DreamWorks later that year (only to be put on hold so that he could first make How To Train Your Dragon). Within that time, The Croods went through a number of rewrites, and what we have in the end is a "nice enough" film that feels awfully slight. The caveman wander around for a bit, edge a bit closer toward modern living, then something dramatic happens in the third act and that's it. I have two major qualms with it, both of which concern that aforementioned third act: its appallingly implemented false ending (the film initially looks as if it's going to close on a surprisingly ballsy tearjerker, only to back out of that and go on for a further ten minutes) and the film's actual ending, which feels way too reminiscent of the ending to How To Train Your Dragon.

Second was Despicable Me 2, Illumination's first (and, at the time of writing, only) film to be nominated for this award. Up until now I'd been doing a good job of steering clear of the Despicable Me franchise, but for the purposes of covering everything on this list I did finally have to swallow my pride and sit down with this one. A friend of mine offered to feel me in on what happened in the first film and then proceeded to go off on a protracted rant about how dubious the moral was, in that it was basically preaching that bad guys are all single people without families and that the main character finds redemption through his interest in raising an adopted litter. I suppose I gleaned enough about the plot from that. Anyway, Despicable Me 2 was much as I expected. Animation style has a nice slick sheen to it, story is serviceable but nothing too special, those helium-sucking Minion things are certainly NOT my cup of tea (well, except for that one who fancied himself and Lucy as an item; I have to admit that did raise a smile). It goes without saying that this thing is lowbrow as fuck, which depending on your personal tastes may make or break it for you - if you like gags about shark abuse, psychotic chickens and characters who snicker uncontrollably when they hear the word "bottom", then Despicable Me 2 has you pretty well covered.


The Snub Club:

Remember how last year DreamWorks tried something just a little above their station with Rise of The Guardians and it didn't quite work out for them? Well, this year it was Blue Sky's turn to aim high and plummet. They turned out Epic, their most serious and ambitious film to date, and the world couldn't have been less impressed. Epic received tepid reviews from the critics and made less domestically than any other Blue Sky film at the time (and barely more than Robots worldwide). Myself, I had mixed feelings about Epic. On the one hand, it was nice to see Blue Sky step out of their comfort zone and try something other than a buddy comedy about sitcom-minded animals (or robots). That Epic barely made a dent at the box office while an absolute piece of shit like Ice Age: Continental Drift made over 800 million worldwide was probably not indication that they would straying from their formula again any time soon. Then again, Epic is ambitious without being particularly inspired or innovative. It tries to be something more mature and sophisticated than we'd ordinarily associate with this studio yet ultimately succumbs to too many bad habits - those two wisecracking slug sidekicks are very archetypal Blue Sky characters, cut from the same obnoxious cloth as the sloth from Ice Age and the bulldog from Rio. We also get a frog voiced by Pitbull who fits in about as well here as he would have done in Frozen (there's an uneasy tension between the film's dual pursuits of old-school adventure and modern, cutting edge hipness that's never resolved). At least there's a real cute pug dog.

Epic was based on the book The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs by William Joyce, which I've never read, but I get a strong sense of what was so misguided about the production just from Chris Wedge's words in this USA Today interview, "while Bill wrote a wonderful book, it is a quaint story. We wanted to make a gigantic action-adventure story." In other words, they took all the character and subtlety out of Joyce's creation and made it into something flashy and cookie cutter. Also, I don't know if the notion of a war between Life and Decay came from Joyce or Blue Sky, but I'm not sure if I buy the two as opposing forces - aren't life and decay just part of the same ongoing cycle? What's a detritivore supposed to do?

A notable absentee from this year's nominations were Academy favourites Pixar - this was only the second time since the award began that they had been shut out from the ceremony (the previous occasion was in 2012 - with Cars 2, so no one actually cared, mind). The Academy have been accused, both rightly and wrongly, of showing an enormous amount of favouritism to Pixar over the years, but honestly I think that it swings both ways and that the Academy can be particularly hard on Pixar when they fail to live up to expectations. Monsters University is definitely average by Pixar standards but I'm not sure if I'd call it an objectively worse film than The Croods or Despicable Me 2. Maybe it's more the principle of the thing. This glimpse into Mike and Sulley's frat boy days was 100% unnecessary and I know that a lot of people shared my unease about how reliant Pixar were slowly becoming upon eking out their existing franchises - no one likes to see the masters of innovation be divorced from their original touch.

And then there was Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 and - ugh, no way am I touching this one. Just looking at the trailers for this made me feel really unwell. I said that the original film makes the act of eating look seriously unsexy, but this one looks more like some kind of food poisoning-induced nightmare. I strongly believe that this may be the one film with the potential to freak me out more than Meet The Feebles. You're going to have to find me in a far more masochistic frame of mind.

Animation Oscar Bite 2013: Revenge of The Red-Headed Stepchild

85th Academy Awards - 24th February 2013

The contenders: Brave, Frankenweenie, ParaNorman, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, Wreck-It-Ralph

The winner: Brave

The rightful winner: ParaNorman

The barrel-scraper: Frankenweenie

 

Other Notes:

Oh boy, were people pissed off about this one.

I described the results of the 2002 ceremony, where Shrek triumphed over Monsters, Inc, as this category's "most controversial move to date," but in terms of the seething, lingering internet anger it generated I think this year might actually have it beat. People widely agree that Monsters, Inc holds up as a stronger film than Shrek and that the Academy were a little off in their judgement back in 2002, but you don't tend to see a whole lot of really potent bitterness on the matter. People have generally accepted what happened and moved on, content that Pixar had plenty of opportunities to shine thereafter. But the 2013 ceremony...well, that's a whole different kettle of catfish. People are still livid that Pixar's Brave beat Disney's Wreck-It Ralph, and they continue to treat every subsequent Academy Awards ceremony as another opportunity to vent their outrage. Whenever you come across someone trying make the case that this award is meaningless or that Pixar ALWAYS win even when they submit a mediocre entry (totally untrue, as Lightning McQueen can attest) it's this outcome they'll invariably point toward.

It's true of course that Brave is one of Pixar's less popular films. Not "less popular" in the A Bug's Life sense, where people have just kind of forgotten that it exists, but in the sense that there are a lot of very vocal people who actively scorn it - which, again, I suspect has a lot to do with the fact that it beat fan favourite Wreck-It Ralph to top honors (Wreck-It Ralph didn't exactly blow away the box office, but its numerous references to gaming culture ensured that it quickly picked up a robust cult following). If it hadn't won this award, I suspect that it would be regarded as "a mild disappointment" as opposed to "TEH WORZT PIXAR FLIM EVA!!!"

Personally...I was okay with Brave. It wasn't Up or Ratatouille; there were no scenes that had me gasping or crying or wanting to stand up and cheer, but it held my interest and there's not really anything I actively disliked about it. Honestly, my number one problem with Brave would have to be its moniker. I do not think that "Brave" is a very good title. In fact, I think it's one heck of a dumb title. My problem with it is that it's incredibly vague and generic, and shows no interest in conveying anything about the tone or character of the film itself. We all know that the film was originally going to be called "The Bear and The Bow" but that was booted when the weak box office returns for The Princess and The Frog gave Disney a fantastic fear of anything that sounded vaguely fairy tale-related. Instead, they sought something hard and edgy that wouldn't have male twenty-something theatre patrons blushing at the ticketing booth...and "Brave" was really the best they could come up with? I had to smirk at the film's efforts to justify it by having its protagonist close off by saying something along the lines of, "We can all achieve our destiny if we're brave enough to see it!" Nice try, but you could just have easily called the film "Destiny". Or "See". Or "Help! My Maw Is A Bear!" which would have at least been tailored to suit the film's plot. (In fairness, the title might have been conceived as a nod to the song "Scotland The Brave", but it's still ridiculously vague.)

In the end, the real issue with Brave has less to do with the film itself than with its odious backstory. It's no secret that historically Pixar have had a real problem when it comes to female representation, both within their pictures and behind the scenes. Brave was initially touted as being the project that would finally shatter Pixar's "boys club" image, it being not only their first ever film to feature a female protagonist, but their first to be helmed by a female director (Brenda Chapman, who had previously co-directed the DreamWorks Animation film The Prince of Egypt). Then came the news in late 2010 that Chapman had been forced out of the project and replaced by a male director, Mark Andrews, and this caused a lot of heartbreak among those hoping to see greater female presence in the animation industry. Chapman, of course, is not the only director to have been unceremoniously booted under Lasseter. From what little I know about Jan Pinkava's original version of Ratatouille, I think it was probably for the best that the project was handed over to Brad Bird. Chris Sanders' American Dog I'm less sure about, given how Bolt turned out. We don't know exactly what happened with Brave (all we got was the standard "creative differences" explanation) but I can take an educated guess - given those aforementioned concerns surrounding the commercial failure of The Princess and The Frog, I find it entirely plausible that Lasseter looked at this very female-orientated picture and became jumpy about it, telling Chapman that she either had to testosterone things up a notch or go. Chapman resisted, so she was out.

It's at this point that we may as well address the elephant in the room regarding John Lasseter - at the time of writing, he is taking a leave of absence from Disney following allegations of sexual misconduct around the workplace. When this was announced in late November 2017, many people reacted with shock. Lasseter was supposed to be one of the good guys of Hollywood, right? To those with a keen interest in the animation industry, however, it merely seemed to confirm that some of the worst rumours we'd heard about Lasseter in the aftermath of Chapman's firing were true. I wasn't aware that the issues went as far as sexual harassment, but I had heard reports that Lasseter had quite a malodorous attitude toward his female colleagues and that his real beef with Chapman was that he simply didn't like that a girl had climbed up the ladder into his all-boys clubhouse. When the news broke about Lasseter, I was disappointed, but not really surprised.

What's sad about Brave is that the story was clearly a deeply personal one for Chapman, having been based on her relationship with her own daughter. The mother-daughter relationship still remains at the centre of the finished film, but I think it's safe to say that Andrews' heart wasn't as invested in this as Chapman's would have been; Brave is serviceable, but it doesn't emit a whole lot of passion for its setting or scenario. Ultimately, I'm inclined to rank Brave alongside such Disney not-quites as The Fox and The Hound and Brother Bear (the latter of which Brave received much comparison to - to my immense surprise, as I didn't think there were many souls out there who actually remembered Brother Bear in 2012). They're not bad films but they are each hampered by their timid, compromised tone; in all cases, you get the feeling that there was a potentially great film in here, but it wasn't allowed to be all that it could be. Brave is more of a missed opportunity than anything else.

Here's my number one problem with Wreck-It Ralph: that Vanellope von Schweetz character is really fucking dreadful. Sorry, but the instant she opened her mouth I could feel whatever emotional investment I had in the story gurgling nosily down the plughole. You can undo a heck of a lot of good work by including a sequence where one of your characters screeches the same belabored scatological joke over and over in the most teeth-clenchingly annoying tone possible, and that's something that Rich Moore and Phil Johnston might want to keep in mind if they fancy the Oscar chances of that upcoming sequel where Ralph breaks the internet.

Of the remaining nominees, the one that surprised me the most was Laika's ParaNorman. My number one nitpick with this entry was that I didn't find the character designs to be particularly appealing (there was something about them I found vaguely reminiscent of the kind of stop motion figures you'd encounter in 1990s snack food commercials) but the story and characters themselves were so fresh and engaging that I honestly didn't mind. ParaNorman is a well-crafted and intelligent meditation on the pains and the joys of being an outsider, and also on the road to Hell being paved with good intentions - the film purposely eschews traditional villainy, opting instead to have all of its conflict arise from misjudgements and miscommunication. As a horror-fantasy, it's not quite as beautifully, beguilingly twisted an experience as Coraline - this is more like The Goonies meets The Sixth Sense meets Night of The Living Dead, with a twist - but it's still a good mix and back in 2012 this was welcome proof that Laika were more than just a one movie wonder. I'll also make note of that gag at the end where one of the characters casually reveals himself to be gay, and it's done in a way where the joke doesn't seem at the expense of either the character or his sexuality. I bring this up because it's leaps and bounds ahead of Disney's recent attempt at LGBT representation in that awful live action Beauty and The Beast remake (live action LeFou is about as progressive a LGBT character as Wiggins from Pocahontas).

Meanwhile, Aardman Animations finally got to release their dream project, The Pirates! Band of Misfits (actually, it was The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! in its native Blighty but I guess it was changed due to a fear that American audiences get spooked by anything vaguely intellectual-sounding?), their first claymation feature film since Curse of The Were-Rabbit in 2005. Adapted from a series of novels by Gideon Defoe, Aardman had apparently pitched this one to DreamWorks Animation during their short-lived partnership but were told that there was no market for pirate pictures (this was before that Disney film with Johnny Depp came along and launched one of the most annoying cinematic franchises of modern times). Unfortunately (and much like Arthur Christmas before it), Aardman's pirate picture struggled to find an audience (at least outside of the UK), prompting the proposed sequel, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Cowboys!, to be scrapped. My heart bled for director Peter Lord, because I know how long he'd been wanting to make this film and how intent he was on doing a full series based on Defoe's novels. However, I would be lying if I said that I felt a great deal of personal heartbreak at the prospect of no more Pirates! I liked the original just fine, but it didn't leave me baying for more. It's one of those fun-while-it-lasts films that doesn't leave much of a lasting impression. What I mainly enjoyed were the cameos by Jane Austen and the Elephant Man.

The nadir of the night was Tim Burton's Frankenweenie, an animated remake of his 1984 live action short about a pulverised terrier who gets raised from the dead. Perhaps the real reason why I honestly can't be too hard on Brave is because Frankenweenie came as a far more crushing disappointment to me. I genuinely expected this to my favourite movie of the year - it deals with a subject near and dear to my heart (pet bereavement), the titular mutt bears a striking resemblance to the four-legged lead from Family Dog, and it's loaded with horror iconography. By rights I should have been all over this thing. Sadly, it's all undone by an absolute bummer of a story, with its forlornly muddled attitude toward life and death (I'm aware that the film's cop-out happy ending is faithful to the original short, but that doesn't make it a satisfying one) and its thoughtless double standards regarding which master-pet relationships are worthy of veneration and which aren't (you don't need to be a cat person to appreciate that Weird Girl and Mr Whiskers get a seriously ugly deal). The stop motion animation is technically superb, but the visuals do have a tedious familiarity about them - not just the dog, but a significant portion of the cast look like characters from previous Burton works, in a manner that reveals the limitations of Burton's style more than anything else, eg: the protagonist from Frankenweenie looks like a recycled version of the hero from Corpse Bride (that they're both called Victor is kind of a necessary evil, given that he's based on Victor Frankenstein). Not to mention that "Pluto is not a planet?" jokes were really old hat in 2012 (what time period is this supposed to be set in anyway? If not for that one stupid line I would have said late 1940s).


The Snub Club:

Elsewhere in the animation industry, 2012 proved to be the year that DreamWorks Animation finally ran out of luck: Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted did fine (obviously I stayed well away from that one), but Rise of The Guardians was not a financial success, kick-starting a pattern where DreamWorks would consistently lose money on high-budgeted titles that didn't click with the public and were forced to lay off employees in droves. Rise of The Guardians, adapted from a series of novels by William Joyce, was one of DreamWorks' more ambitious projects - it's dark, moody and atmospheric and it takes itself a lot more seriously than most DreamWorks films before it. It's also one of DreamWorks' most arresting pieces visually, which is not to say that it's an especially pretty-looking film - it goes so out of its way to avoid anything remotely cuddly or cutesy-looking that often it embraces full-on grotesqueness - yet there is something strangely enthralling about the spectacle of it all. I want to call Rise of The Guardians one of DreamWorks' better films, although I am also inclined think of it as a failure. It's an awfully nice try that doesn't quite get it right. Perhaps the world, story and characters needed better fleshing out. Perhaps Jack Frost needed to be a slightly less obnoxious protagonist (he gets a horrifically tragic backstory, but a little too late). Perhaps Pitch needed to have more dimension as an antagonist (I actually find myself feeling a certain degree of sympathy for Pitch in the end. Is there any reason why he couldn't stick around and have Halloween? Kids like being scared on Halloween).

Blue Sky released Ice Age: Continental Drift, which made an absolute killing at the international box office despite being one of the shittiest films ever made (I'd like to think that a good chunk of that audience were just in it for the Maggie Simpson short at the start - which I did like, by the way - but maybe that's just wishful thinking). Continental Drift has no heart, no soul, no mind, no spine, no anything; it's the epitome of a cynical cash grab, and the only thing I kind-of sort-of liked about it was the badger. By this stage, the Ice Age franchise was clearly struggling with the demands of balancing an increasingly cluttered cast - Ellie's possum "brothers" are here reduced to background extras while we get some uber-hackneyed subplot where Manny and Ellie's teenage daughter learns a vital lesson in personal integrity when she ditches her best friend (a bizarre mole-hedgehog chimera) to hang out with the in-crowd (what is this, Leave It To Beaver?). Then there's Diego's female counterpart, who turns her back on her life of piracy and sides with the good guys for no other reason than the script demands it. By now I was very conscious of the fact that the humans who played a major role in the first film haven't been seen or mentioned since, and I kept wondering if humans are still even a part of this world, or if this is now set in some freaky alternate universe where humans went extinct and mammoths became the dominant species. Roshan and his solemn, quietly dignified tribe frankly don't feel as if they could fit in any more with this increasingly monstrous inanity.

Finally, in the this-happened-but-I-wasn't-paying-much-attention category, the Hotel Transylvania series got its start this year. I've heard mixed things.