Animation Oscar Bite 2006: The Killing Moon

78th Academy Awards - 5th March 2006

The contenders: Corpse Bride, Howl's Moving Castle, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of The Were-Rabbit

The winner: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of The Were-Rabbit

The rightful winner: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of The Were-Rabbit

The barrel-scraper: None. This is a very solid line-up.

Other Notes:

2006 was a shameful year for the Oscars overall, what with that utterly inexplicable Best Picture winner (it was explicable in the sense that back then the Academy were blatantly too timid to give the award to the film about the gay cowboys eating pudding, but there were still three other pictures they could have chosen instead of the worthless piece of shit that won. ANYTHING would have been a better choice than Crash. This wasn't a very happy birthday for Scampy!) Oh, but the Best Animated Feature category didn't let me down. The best of the bunch triumphed, but I was honestly impressed with all of the entries this time round - some were stronger than others, but none of them struck of me as "filler", and amazingly not a trendy CG feature in sight. Given that Hollywood's love affair with CG animation had swelled to the point that even the studio that had once pioneered the traditional 2D animated feature was now officially abandoning its heritage to jump on the bandwagon (see below), it was refreshing to see a line-up comprised exclusively of old school techniques.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was nothing short of a miracle. It's a miracle that a film so self-assuredly Aardman got made at all during the studio's short-lived association with Katzenberg's fleet. They were not exactly peas in a pod - the quaint, droll Bristol-based studio, masters of the muted background gag, and the loud, aggressively irreverent DreamWorks, masters of celebrity-whoring and timely cultural references - so it didn't come as a huge surprise when their partnership was terminated after a measly three pictures, with Aardman admitting that the DreamWorks model didn't work for them (and vice versa). Shortly before the UK release of Chicken Run in 2000, the BBC broadcast a documentary celebrating Aardman's shift to the big screen - I caught that documentary on tape, and I've been meaning to go through it and dissect just how much positivity they attempt to lavish on a partnership that was doomed from the outset.* Given how much control DreamWorks reportedly exerted over Aardman productions under their tenure, it's remarkable that Wallace & Gromit's big screen outing remained so authentic to the basic spirit of Aardman and W&G in particular. It's a larger scale production than anything the cheese-loving inventor and his mute mongrel had partaken in until now, but it doesn't have that weirdly compromised tone that Chicken Run and especially Flushed Away had, where too much Hollywood pizzazz was being shoehorned into an aesthetic that really wasn't suited to it. The two biggest names in the cast, Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter, don't feel at all out of place here, in part because they're entirely at home in recreating the caricature English whimsy that has always been central to Nick Park's creations. And yet, it's clear that Aardman had to fight every step of the way to keep its W&G-ness intact. When promoting on his 2008 short, A Matter of Loaf and Death, Park commented what a relief it was not to "feel like I'm a making a film for a kid in some suburb of America - and being told they're not going to understand a joke, or a northern saying."

Curse of The Were-Rabbit would always have been my top choice, although truth be told I wouldn't have been terribly disappointed if Howl's Moving Castle had pipped it. As with every Hayao Miyazaki film, it's a rich visual banquet that transports the viewer into a full-on hurricane of beauty and strangeness. I know that some people find the narrative too messy and meandering, particularly when compared to the haunting elegance of Spirited Away (and there are enough people who find that story too confusing), but to me it's still a fine example of Miyazaki's mastery as a storyteller who prefers to show, not tell, especially in Sophie's growing compassion for the collection of oddballs she's unceremoniously saddled with. 

Even the weakest of the trio, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, has a lot of recommend it. It's not quite the pure macabre joy that was The Nightmare Before Christmas (yes, I know that Tim Burton didn't direct that one, but they were inevitably going to be compared), its main shortcomings being that it ends very abruptly (I've never liked how Victor's parents simply disappear from the film right before the third act) and the plot "twist" regarding the identity of Emily's killer is obvious long before it's revealed. The songs, penned by Danny Elfman, aren't amazingly memorable, but they're more than serviceable. And the voice cast is strong - I mean, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are there in the sense that it was a 2000s Burton film, so of course they had to be (it's not that they're terrible choices, but there's no surprise or spontaneity in their involvement), but the supporting cast, which includes the likes of Tracey Ullman, Paul Whitehouse and Richard E. Grant, turn out some wickedly zestful performances.


The Snub Club:

Although they did get representation at the ceremony by means of their (now defunct) partnership with Aardman, DreamWorks Animation found themselves shut out for the first time, with their 2005 offering Madagascar failing to secure any Academy recognition. Yippee ki-yay. Watching Madagascar made me feel positively murderous back in 2005 - in narrative terms, it's an absolute car wreck, bereft both of focus and even the vaguest idea of what it's about, beyond accumulating enough tiresome hi-jinks to fill up feature length and selling a few ugly plush toys on the side (the characters in Madagascar are really ugly and stupid-looking, in addition to being insufferable). When the ending comes, it's both merciful and painfully abrupt, an obvious case of, "OKAY, WE GOT THIS THING PAST 80 MINUTES, LET'S PACK UP HERE!" I walked away from the multiplex, totally beleaguered and eager to put the experience behind me; unlucky me, DreamWorks were dead-set upon turning this into a Shrek-sized franchise, meaning that I was in for years and years of seeing that stupid, ugly Ben Stiller lion plastered all over the place.

(Actually, you know what irritated me most about Madagascar? The notion that a society of lemurs would make Sacha Baron Cohen their leader. Lemurs are matriarchal, so shove off.)

Elsewhere, Blue Sky released their second feature, Robots. Like most non-Ice Age films to come from the 20th Century Fox-owned studio, it was forgotten as soon as it had concluded its theatrical run, although it was at least notable for marking Robin Williams' return to voice-acting in Hollywood animation. Despite making a gargantuan impact with his performance as Genie in Aladdin, Williams' dispute with Disney in the aftermath meant that he was left something of a persona non grata at both Disney and DreamWorks (since Katzenberg had been one of the Disney executives he'd clashed with) and had limited options while the industry was still largely dominated by those two studios.

And speaking of the House of Mouse, 2005 was a downright dispiriting year to be a Disney fan; in their ongoing struggle to regain relevance in a marketplace that had changed dramatically since the days of their 90s Renaissance, they attempted to reinvent themselves as makers of wacky, CG comedies in the DreamWorks mold, and hit absolute rock-bottom in the process. Chicken Little may seem like an utterly inconsequential picture now - a wrong turn down a very bad neighbourhood that Disney were smart enough to reverse from almost instantly - but watching it appear back in 2005 was pretty danged terrifying, because it was closely linked to the messy divorce that Disney were currently on the verge of with their bedfellows at Pixar. Pixar's contract with Disney was up for renewal and, with their juggernaut status now well and cemented, Pixar were hoping to cut themselves a much better deal this time round. Eisner, however, was not very motivated to save the Disney/Pixar relationship, believing that once Disney had made the switch to 3D animation they'd be able to rival Pixar at the box office. For such a stupid movie, Chicken Little seemed to have an awful lot of destiny riding on it. Mercifully, while it wasn't exactly the box office bomb it richly deserved to be, Chicken Little didn't get anywhere close to the box office intake of Monsters, Inc, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, and Disney and Pixar were ultimately able to salvage their relations (Eisner's departure in late 2005 certainly helped negotiations), with Disney buying Pixar in 2006 and John Lasseter subsequently being appointed chief creative officer of both Pixar and Disney Feature Animation (how is that going, mate?). Disney still had a long way to go before they were on top of the world again, but they never again made anything as vile and downright unwatchable as Chicken Little, and that's something to be thankful for.

In an attempt prove that CG animation wasn't just for the big boys in Hollywood, 2005 also gave us a small trickling of European CG features, including Action Synthese's big screen recreation of The Magic Roundabout (I've not seen it, but I'll wager it's no Dougal and The Blue Cat) and the UK-made Valiant from Vanguard Animation, which boasted a lot of familiar British voice talent but not much else in the way of interest. If you remember Valiant at all, then odds are it's because the experience of sitting through the trailer made your eyes pop from your skull. Damn, those pigeons were not lookers.

* Admittedly, all of this was pre-Shrek. Shrek was obviously the big game-changer in determining what kind of studio DreamWorks wanted to be. Given the direction in which Katzenberg had been pushing Pixar in the early days of Toy Story, however, I think that Aardman were always going to be out of their element here. What is very telling about the documentary in question is how it slips in some brief but unsubtle Disney vilification. Also, Mike Scully apparently thinks that animation is intrinsically better when it's funny, not dramatic. Oh well, screw him.