83rd Academy Awards - 27th February 2011
The contenders: How To Train Your Dragon, The Illusionist, Toy Story 3
The winner: Toy Story 3
The rightful winner: The Illusionist
The barrel-scraper: None this year.
Other notes:
Ha! I bet you were wondering when I was actually going to disagree with one of these again. I have to admit that, looking back, I was surprised by just how rarely I disagreed with the results for the award's first decade worth of life. Here's where it starts to get interesting on that front, because I've worked it out and there's only one other ceremony to date where I wholeheartedly agreed with the Academy's choice (care to guess which one?).
Anyway, I do wish to be very clear that, even though I'm not as hot on it as most Pixar devotees, I do like Toy Story 3 and think that it's a good film. I just don't have any problem in declaring it Pixar's most overrated film to date, nor admitting that every time I hear someone refer to the Toy Story films as "the perfect trilogy", I can feel my teeth gritting on behalf of the Bo Peep fan in me. I'll be upfront on this point - a big reason why Toy Story 3 left me feeling sightly tepid is because I didn't care for the glib and extremely abrupt way that Bo Peep was dropped from the entire scenario. And when I read the film-makers' reasoning for this, it honestly cheesed me off a little. I don't have the exact quote to hand, nor do I remember which member of staff said it, but I do recall being linked to an extract from an interview back in 2010 in which one of them commented on Bo Peep's absence. They said something along the lines of, oh she was just our token female for the first film so we never made a big deal about her anyway, but what sealed her fate was the realisation that Andy would have nothing deep or meaningful to say about her when he gives his toys to Bonnie at the end. Yep. Because what he said about the three rubber aliens was really deep and meaningful. "These little dudes are from a strange, alien world - Pizza Planet!" Blech, sod that.
(It's for this reason that I am NOT opposed to Toy Story 4, and I was genuinely happy when I learned that it would focus on Woody and Bo, although in light of recent developments at Pixar I'm not really sure how high I should be setting my expectations for that film any more. Hopefully it can overcome its recent setbacks.)
Bo Peep's absence wasn't the only thing that bugged me about Toy Story 3, mind. Something about the villain's arc also didn't sit well with me, although I find it harder to pinpoint what exactly. Clearly, Pixar were determined to go all-out with Lotso and make him the Toy Story villain to end all Toy Story villains - he's so much meaner than Pete from Toy Story 2, although also less convincing. Unlike Pete, whose pitiful origins were expressed succinctly and clearly established his motivations for being a self-serving schemer, Lotso gets a drawn-out flashback sequence expounding his tragic backstory, which explains his cynicism toward the child-toy relationship, but not why he takes such tyrannical glee in seeing the toys in the Caterpillar Room suffer. I guess that Lotso just enjoys making other toys feel worthless out of misplaced anger toward the kid who dumped him all those years ago? Fine, although I suspect the real reason for Lotso's backstory has less to do with accounting for the way he is in the present than it does tricking the viewer into thinking that he might be redeemable; that way, they'll really have the rug pulled out from under them when Lotso willfully leaves Woody and co to burn (not that I didn't see that coming; villain redemption isn't a point that Pixar have ever been big on). There's something about the whole situation with Lotso that I find very unpleasantly cold. I understand that early test audiences really didn't take to that redemption fake-out and wanted Lotso to be redeemed for real, which is why the final film is so emphatic on his dog-in-manger qualities (the character of Big Baby wasn't even present in earlier drafts of the script). But there-in lies another problem - would it actually have been right for Chuckles and Big Baby to have returned home if it meant leaving their strawberry-scented comrade out in the cold? In his narration, Chuckles even implies that it was thanks to Lotso's leadership and perseverance that they made it back at all. I'll concede that it wasn't Lotso's decision to make, but at that moment where Chuckles says, "No, she only replaced you," my immediate thoughts were, "You know, your lack of sensitivity probably isn't helping, Chuckles."
Anyway, I've rambled on enough about what didn't work for me. I should say more about what I liked: I liked the scenes with Barbie and Ken. I liked the toy telephone and his characteristic method of communicating. I LOVED the cymbal-banging monkey with his horrible rabid eyes. I liked the scene where Lotso's henchmen were gambling using the See n' Say as a Roulette wheel. Like everyone else on the planet I was a blubbering, quivering wreck during that scene in the incinerator. And the overall themes about growing up, moving on and finding renewed purpose were well-done and a neat, thoughtful way of taking advantage of the decade-long gap between films 2 and 3 (which was tied up in studio politics and at one point entailed that whole Circle 7 debacle), one which I'm sure resonated well with the many children who were introduced to Toy Story as nippers and had come of age within that time. There is an awful lot that I love about this film, but it misses out on being a masterpiece for me.
I think Nostradamus (or maybe just Harold Camping) prophesied that end-times were nigh when a certain animation fan gravitated more toward a DreamWorks Animation picture than to a Pixar one. The rift between John Lasseter and Chris Sanders over American Dog (the weird-as-hell project that was eventually reworked as the more conventional Bolt) was apparently ugly enough for Sanders to leave Disney altogether and cross over to the dark side at DreamWorks (taking his good buddy Dean DeBlois with him). Sanders and DeBlois wasted no time in gifting their new overlords with their most splendid film thus far, and certainly the only one that could reasonably withstand comparison to Pixar. I'd say that How To Train Your Dragon and Toy Story 3 are about evenly matched - Dragon has a whole lot of visual splendor and a genuinely heartfelt central thread concerning the symbiotic relationship between its two leads, while Toy Story 3 has more quirky, characteristic touches (see all of the stuff mentioned above) and the benefit of boasting some of the most iconic animated characters of the past two decades. In both cases, my biggest reservations lie with the villains. Lotso just isn't the sum of his parts, while Red Death is an uninteresting stock antagonist (honestly, given that the film pivots on the notion that scary and ferocious-looking beings might just be misunderstood, it seems kind of a cop-out to resolve the central conflict by throwing in a bigger, badder beast for both sides to pummel the snot out of). They're both strong, if imperfect films, but in the end I'm inclined to give Dragon the edge. Something about the friendship between Hiccup and Toothless really speaks to me, more so than that final sequence in Toy Story 3 that had everyone else in buckets (perhaps I was just too pissed off about Bo).
It's all a moot point, anyway, because I'm giving this one to Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist. Now that is what I call a masterpiece, friends.
The Snub Club:
In addition to Toy Story, 2010 saw the return of another old favourite (?) with Shrek Forever After, which at the time was touted as being the final outing for DreamWorks' flagship cash cow, although even then I had a sneaking suspicion that they couldn't stay away forever (reportedly, we've got a new Shrek film to look forward to in 2019). Following the monster-sized success of Shrek 2, Jeffrey Katzenberg initially claimed that there would be three more Shrek films and that these each would answer all-important questions about Shrek and his universe, but clearly something went very wrong; I can only assume that Shrek The Third, an astonishingly joyless experience, killed a lot of enthusiasm behind-the-scenes as well as in front of it. I think it's also clear that, despite Katzenberg's insistence that there was some kind of grand scheme in mind for the Shrek sequels, they were really just winging it as they went along. Unlike Toy Story 3, which follows on from concerns explicitly raised in Toy Story 2 (namely, what will become of the toys when Andy outgrows them), Shrek Forever After just smacks of "oh jeez, what more can we possibly do with these characters?" In a strange way, its existence was somewhat justified by the fact that Shrek The Third was such a stinker; perhaps even a franchise as overrated and overhyped as Shrek deserved a chance to go out on a better note (that Shrek Forever After is better than its direct predecessor is as high a compliment I'm willing to pay it). Shrek Forever After was another big earner at the international box office, although domestically it was the lowest-grossing of the Shrek films, a telling sign that the franchise had overstayed its welcome and that people were anxious for this tired run-off of another time and mood to be done already.
Disney had reason to be cheerful toward the end of 2010, for their latest attempt to get in on the CG market, Tangled, brought in the kind of box office returns that had been eluding them ever since Shrek moved into town (although the film spent so long in production and wound up costing such a gargantuan sum that I doubt Disney made much of a profit on it). Perhaps it was a sign of Shrek's diminished hold on popular consciousness that the public were willing to embrace a film so sincere about wanting to recapture the spirit of Disney past - I'd like to think that it had far less to do with the film's marketing campaign, the company's most witless and pandering since Chicken Little. Tangled, like The Princess and The Frog, felt like a reaction against Disney's (largely misguided) attempts to reinvent themselves in the age of wacky CG comedies, in returning to the core values which had yielded numerous classics in the past - enchantment, adventure and good old-fashioned emotional resonance. Having said that, I walked away more appreciating what Tangled had attempted than I did love the film. I have to admit, I spent a lot of the time fixating on Rapunzel's chameleon sidekick and wondering just what purpose he was actually serving beyond merchandising potential. Turns out, his only functional action in the entire film is to murder the evil step-mother. Damn. Tangled didn't quite signal the start of the new Disney Renaissance for me, but it was an important stepping stone in getting there. Brighter times were ahead, although sadly the comparative failure of The Princess and The Frog made it crystal clear that Disney's future would would be all in CG.
The other big thing that happened in 2010 was the arrival of yet another new hopeful in the form of Illumination Entertainment, the Universal-owned animation studio founded by former Blue Sky president Chris Meledandri. No one knew it at the time, but DreamWorks were about to take a serious in dip in popularity and these cutthroat upstarts were gearing up to take their place. Their debut film, Despicable Me, scored impressive box office returns but I passed it over back in 2010. People tell me it's pretty good, but Illumination's increasing insistence on shoving those damned Minion things down everyone's throat in the years that followed has merely upped my resistance to wanting to experience the franchise for myself. Unfortunately, I may be duty-bound to do that soon, given that one of the sequels had more luck on the nomination front. Now that's a thought that really sets my teeth on edge.
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