Animation Oscar Bite 2003: A Tale of Two Spirits

75th Academy Awards - 23rd March 2003

The contenders: Ice Age, Lilo & Stitch, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, Spirited Away, Treasure Planet

The winner: Spirited Away

The rightful winner: Spirited Away

The barrel-scraper: Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron

Other Notes:

I remember this result taking a number of people by surprise back in 2003, largely because Spirited Away was seen as something as a "dark horse" entry in the build-up to the ceremony. Studio Ghibli are a well-recognised name now, sure, but prior to Spirited Away's success at the Oscars, they didn't have a great deal of familiarity in the west outside of diehard anime buffs and those who'd picked up the VHS release of Kiki's Delivery Service back in 1998. The English dub of the film had already received a theatrical release in September 2002, but it took that Academy Award for it to turn heads and give Hayao Mizazaki a sudden, much-deserved surge in popularity among Western audiences, softening the heart of many an anime skeptic who'd written the form off as catering strictly to greasy fanboys and hyperactive seven-year-olds.

With hindsight, Spirited Away's win feels like a total no-brainer, as none of the other nominees come anywhere close to it. A miraculous marriage of visual richness and narrative subtlety, it tells an enormously moving coming of age story without ever having to overstate its protagonist's progression from sullen brat to assured heroine, while the spirit world it creates is convincingly otherworldly, offering just the right balance of whimsical intrigue and grotesque disconcertion. Of the remaining nominees, Disney's Lilo & Stitch offered the worthiest competition, with its charmingly offbeat combination of contemporary family drama and sci-fi anarchy, but it all feels somewhat small fry and inelegant compared to the sweeping grandeur of Spirited Away. Ice Age, the debut feature of the 20th Century Fox-owned Blue Sky Studios, arrived at a time when the sheer novelty of CG animation was apparently still enough that audiences were willing to overlook its predictable and unambitious story (honestly, if not for the fact that Blue Sky insists on churning out another useless sequel every few years, I suspect that the original Ice Age would have been long-forgotten by now). Disney's Treasure Planet was a notorious flop and had a massive hand in the demise of 2D animation in general (see below), but critics did respond positively to its visuals. But for all of their faults, those films seem like Citizen Kane compared to DreamWorks Animation's Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, which is one of the worst animated features ever to come out of Hollywood (Don Bluth - you're forgiven. It's this horsey movie which really grinds my gears). What I find particularly repellent about Spirit is that it was blatantly conceived with the same misguided intentions of roping a Best Picture nomination that fuelled Jeffrey Katzenberg's thought processes during the production of Disney's Pocahontas, and with even more toe-curling results. People give Pocahontas a lot of flack, but I find that I can only be so hard on it, because it was made with a basic level of storytelling competence which Spirit would absolutely kill for. In the end, Spirit had to settle for a measly Best Animated Feature nomination, and even that made a complete mockery of everything it was up against (the depressing thing? Spirit is only the second worst animated feature ever to have snagged a nomination in this category. Just wait until we get to the 2005 ceremony...)

Finally, you might have noticed that, with the single exception of Ice Age, the nominees this year were largely dominated by traditional 2D. You are advised not to get too attached to this state of affairs. 3D hadn't quite edged 2D out of the multiplexes yet, but the transition was well underway - Spirit: Stallion of The Cimarron was to be DreamWorks' penultimate 2D feature, while all Disney had left on that front (prior the short-lived revival between 2009 and 2011) were a couple of leftover projects that had been grappling with story development issues since the 1990s. To date, Spirited Away remains the only traditional 2D animated film to have picked up this award, which should tell you something about just how exceedingly rare it likewise is for a non-Hollywood film to triumph in this category; pretty soon, those were all that fans of the traditional style would have left to turn to for their two dimensional fix.