Animation Oscar Bite 2004: Big Fish

76th Academy Awards - 29th February 2004

The contenders: Brother Bear, Finding Nemo, The Triplets of Belleville

The winner: Finding Nemo

The rightful winner: Finding Nemo

The barrel-scraper: Brother Bear

Other Notes:

One of the nice things about doing this retrospective is that it's given me more of an incentive to finally catch up with some of the nominees I missed out on in previous years. I wasn't quite dedicated enough to hunt down a copy of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius for my commentary on the 2002 ceremony, but The Triplets of Belleville is one of those films that's been sat on my to-see list for as long as it's existed, and it really shouldn't have taken me this long to get acquainted with Sylvain Chomet's enchantingly grotesque, (virtually) dialogue-free romp through the freakier fringes of French society (and beyond). Chomet's richly illustrative style is always a treat to look at (the titular city of Belleville being a masterpiece of background design) and there's some wonderful visual wit throughout, a good chunk of it involving Bruno the morbidly obese bloodhound and his ongoing dispute with the train that passes dangerously close to his family's window every day. At a time when traditional animation was being given the cold shoulder by the major Hollywood studios (see below), it must have been heartening to see a 2D animation from overseas roar to life with so much unique flair and character.

Anyway, the CG fish movie won, a result which surprised absolutely no one in 2004. Of the three years for which this award had been running so far, this one was probably the easiest to call. 2003 was the year of Finding Nemo; the film had smashed all kinds of box office records and become the highest grossing animated film to date, both domestically and worldwide, making the humble clownfish, a creature previously renowned mainly among hobbyists, into a household name. Whatever merits The Triplets of Belleville might have had, it seemed unlikely that this small French arthouse film would snatch victory away from the Hollywood giant that had dominated zeitgeist in recent months. To demonstrate how out of sync I was with that zeitgeist, back in 2003 I thought of Finding Nemo as the disappointing follow-up to Monsters, Inc, although it has grown on me a lot in subsequent years and I certainly can't begrudge it taking the award here. Its underwater world is brilliantly realised - anthropomorphised enough to feel warm and familiar, while still retaining that all-important alien, otherworldly quality (and the film truly excels when it full-on embraces that deep sea uncanniness - the two strongest sequences are those involving the angler fish and the whale, two of the least humanised marine lifeforms encountered on Marlin's travels). This is Pixar's most "punchline driven" film to date (by which I mean that the final line plays like the punchline to an overarching gag that the entire rest of the film has merely been laying the stage for) but that punchline is a genuinely hilarious one, so it's all good.

Meanwhile, Disney's fortunes continued to dwindle, with the apathetic response to Brother Bear proving yet another nail in the coffin for traditional 2D animation (at least where Hollywood was concerned). By this stage, the colossal box office failure of Treasure Planet had pretty much already sealed its fate, and Brother Bear stood little chance of turning things around. Compared to the zippy, adventurous energy of Finding Nemo, this modest fable about a bear-hating Inuit who gets turned into a bear and learns the error of his ways couldn't help but seem hopelessly old-fashioned, a sign that Disney were struggling to adapt to an animation marketplace that had already moved on from them. If you're a Disney buff then you've no doubt heard the story that it entered production due to Michael Eisner's unshakeable conviction that bears are the most merchandise-friendly of animals, and that it started out as an ursine version of King Lear before undergoing multiple rewrites; the end-result feels like a torpid attempt to recapture the atmospheric grandeur of The Lion King that had all of its enthusiasm swallowed up somewhere in the process. The film's most interesting feature (aside from its genuinely very beautiful sunlight animation) is in how it marries the last of that waning Happy Meal DNA to a total tonal uncertainty; above all, Brother Bear is a film beleaguered by an alarmingly visible sense of self-doubt (the Disney film most comparable to it in that regard is The Fox and The Hound). I might actually earmark this one for a more in-depth review some time in the future, because it is quite a fascinating specimen in terms of what it reveals about Disney's own veering off into the wilderness at this point in time.

This was also the year that kick-started Pixar's run as the kings of this award, after the disappointment two years prior when Monsters, Inc lost out to Shrek. Soon there would be no stopping them. Well, except where Lightning McQueen was involved.