Animation Oscar Bite 2010: Into the steeple of beautiful people

82nd Academy Awards - 7th March 2010

The contenders: Coraline, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Princess and The Frog, The Secret of Kells, Up

The winner: Up

The rightful winner: Up

The barrel-scraper: None. I still hate Fantastic Mr Fox, though.

Other notes:

When it comes to Up, the one thing that everyone can agree on is that the first ten minutes are utterly sublime. After that, there are some who complain that it turns into a silly adventure story with flying houses, talking dogs and bizarro bird species. To which I invariably respond, it's an adventure story with flying houses, talking dogs and bizarro bird species! How can you possibly not love that?! As far as I'm concerned, Up is not only one of Pixar's greatest films, but one of the all-time greats, period. I cannot say enough good things about Up, so instead of trying I'm just going to make a handful of stray observations:

• One of the most poignant moments in Carl and Ellie's opening montage (other than how it concludes) is when the couple are expecting a baby but it doesn't go to plan. I took from that that Ellie had miscarried and was genuinely surprised at the number of people I later encountered online who were insistent that there's no proof that Ellie was ever pregnant and Carl and Ellie were probably just unable to conceive. It had never occurred to me that it could be anything other than a miscarriage, and I don't want to think of it as anything else. The way that entire moment played out was such a powerful, understated disturbance to Carl and Ellie's married bliss, and I couldn't imagine it having nearly the same impact if there wasn't a sense of the couple losing what they already had. Oh well, online people are weird.
• Beloved though Pixar are, they have taken a lot of (not unwarranted) criticism over the years for their representation of female characters. There's not much skirting around the fact that there was a real paucity of female protagonists in their work up until the last six years (in that time, The Incredibles probably came closest to bucking the trend - Helen Parr almost, but not quite, gets to share centre-stage with her husband). With Brave, Inside Out and Finding Dory, we've seen them take steps in a more inclusive direction (although the first one does have a somewhat unfortunate back story in that regard, which we'll get to in due course), but Pixar has traditionally always been a very male-dominated studio and, for all of the praise I've just lavished on Up, it may actually be one of the worst examples of this. It has just two female characters, one of whom dies within the first ten minutes of the film, the other of whom is a non-speaking bird. It strikes me as a tad ridiculous that all of Muntz's dogs are apparently male, given that he's been sustaining an entire population out there in the wilderness for several decades. (Side-note: To date, Pixar have never done a film where the main villain is female, unless you count Darla from Finding Nemo...but do you?)
• I think that Muntz is a seriously underrated Pixar villain. People tend to overlook just how dark his backstory is, as it's strongly inferred that he has an established pattern of murdering anyone unfortunate enough to run into him in the jungle, just to ensure that they don't get to the bird before he does. The film doesn't overstate this point, but it's absolutely horrifying when you think about it. Besides Syndrome from The Incredibles, how many other Pixar villains were confirmed to be multiple murderers? Like, humans murdering other humans? Clearly, Muntz crossed the point of no return a long time ago.

There's no doubt in my mind that Up was fully deserving of its crown. And yet, there's a part of me that still feels extremely conflicted, because I really do love The Secret of Kells. If Up is as good as it gets, then The Secret of Kells is certainly very worthy competition. Cartoon Saloon had the "dark horse" entry of 2010 - prior to this, I was familiar with the Irish animation studio only for the rather charmless pseudo-American TV series Skunk Fu!. I was blown away by Kells, both by its visual beauty and its unique, authentically Irish voice. It had me earmarking Cartoon Saloon as a studio to watch out for, and all I can say about Skunk Fu! now is, talk about a misleading first impression. Everything I've seen from Cartoon Saloon since, from Song of The Sea to shorter works like Old Fangs and Somewhere Down The Line, has had me spellbound.

Also entering the ring with their debut feature were Laika, the Portland-based studio owned by Nike chairman Phil Knight. Coraline was the latest stop-motion horror from Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick, and a film so eye-poppingly ghoulish that it makes the titular ordeal from Selick's aforementioned Burton collaboration look like a mere idle daydream. My immediate gut-reaction, after viewing Coraline, was to contemplate just how relieved I was that I didn't have to sit through this film as a child - I have a sneaking suspicion that it would have screwed me up severely. Coraline is more terrifying than a whole month's worth of slashers. Muntz may be a murderous lunatic, but at least in his case you could prick the bastard and he'd bleed; I'd sooner take my chances with him out in the middle of nowhere than I would tangle with the Beldam, any day. All in all, this was a strong debut for Laika, who immediately set themselves apart as a studio with a special penchant for the freakish and fantastic. Like Cartoon Saloon, they would find themselves fixtures of nominees lists in subsequent years, although neither studio has thus far managed to take home the crowning glory.

2009 was a crucial year for fans of traditional 2D animation, for after a few years of struggling to find a vacant seat aboard the CG bandwagon, Disney decided to give 2D another shot and go all retro with The Princess and The Frog, a film closer in spirit to the company's 90s output than to the irreverent comedies that had dominated the Hollywood animation scene in the Shrek age. Hopes were high that film would herald the start of a brand new Disney Renaissance, and that 2D animation would be allowed to thrive alongside its flashier modern counterpart, but obviously it didn't work out that way. The Princess and The Frog had a lacklustre time at the box office and in the end did more to seal 2D animation's fate than to vindicate it (with the abysmal box office returns of Winnie The Pooh two years later being the final nail in the coffin). The Princess and The Frog certainly tries hard to replicate what everyone loved about The Little Mermaid et al; perhaps it tries a little too hard. There are moments when it comes across as almost too self-conscious a nostalgia trip, as a film so desperate to ride the coattails of former glories that it never quite finds its own feet. Getting Randy Newman to compose the soundtrack (instead of Alan Menken, as was originally slated) may also have been a mistake - only the villain gets a song that's in any way fun or catchy, while the others are kind of a chore to sit through (especially the one sung by Jenifer Lewis). This is not to say that The Princess and The Frog is a bad film, but it's not an amazingly memorable one either.

If I had to sum up Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox in a single word, it would be "masturbatory". But then you could say that about a lot of his output. Anderson is one of the most masturbatory directors I know. I love the Coen brothers and I love Jim Jarmusch, but something about Anderson has always rubbed me the wrong way, and Fantastic Mr Fox is where he completely lost me...which is a shame, because I really did dig the animation style. Fox is smug, self-indulgent and too in love with its own Wes Anderson-ness to capture anything of Dahl's gruesome wit. It's worth noting that while Fantastic Mr Fox was hailed as a postmodern masterpiece in the US (much to my chagrin, it has the honour of being the first animated film to be inducted into the Criterion Collection) it had a much poorer reception in the UK, where Dahl is considered a national treasure and Fantastic Mr Fox is a beloved childhood classic for many. I haven't met many Brits with a whole lot of positive things to say about this one. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Dahl should be regarded as a sacred cow (Tim Burton's take on Charlie and The Chocolate Factory is closer to the source than Mel Stuart's Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory while also being a significantly weaker film than the Gene Wilder classic - sorry Dahl, but I think that giving Charlie his own flaws to overcome was a pretty good move from a dramatic standpoint) but I do feel that if you're adapting Fantastic Mr Fox and you somehow wind up making Boggis, Bunce and Bean the least interesting characters, you've failed. I'll add that I'm not wild about the upcoming Isle of Dogs either, if only because I get the impression from Anderson's filmography that he really, really hates dogs (and possibly cats too), so it fills my heart with great trepidation that he would want to make film about them. But we'll see.


The Snub Club:

For middling Hollywood output in 2009 you had your choice of either Blue Sky's Ice Age: Dawn of The Dinosaurs, Sony Pictures Animation's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or Dreamworks Animation's Monsters Vs. Aliens. I swear that Dawn of The Dinosaurs must have broken a record for the highest number of dick jokes I've ever seen in a children's film - which in itself wouldn't have raised an eyebrow, except one of them was brazenly copied almost word-for-word from an episode of The Simpsons (I speak of the "no, that's it's tail/the umbilical cord, it's a girl!" line - Fox are allowed to steal from themselves, of course, and I daresay that joke wasn't 100% original back when The Simpsons did it, but you could at least try to vary it up, guys). By now, the Ice Age franchise had gone the way of the Shrek films, in that they blatantly had nothing of any value left to add and were scrabbling around desperately for the vaguest excuse to keep themselves going, although that didn't stop Dawn of The Dinosaurs from becoming Blue Sky's highest grossing film to date, both domestically and worldwide. And since the public insisted on feeding them in droves, you can bet that these mangy beasts would be back for more.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is honestly decent enough. I liked the rat birds (naturally), and it does have its own fairly unique and very kinetic visual style. It makes for a harmless time-killer, and it might also double as an effective appetite suppressant, because all of those close-up shots of mutated food and people guzzling their tracts out inevitably make the act of eating look seriously unsexy.

Also, there was Mary and Max, the debut feature film from Australian animator Adam Elliott. Still haven't seen this one, although if it has anything close to the kind of gentle, lamenting wit present in Elliot's 1996 short Uncle, it ought to be a cracker.