Animation Oscar Bite 2012: The Year We Didn't Give A Damn

84th Academy Awards - 26th February 2012

The contenders: A Cat in Paris, Chico and Rita, Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss in Boots, Rango

The winner: Rango

The rightful winner: Chico and Rita

The barrel-scraper: Frankly, almost any of these could have been barrel-scrapers in a stronger year. In a sea of general mediocrity, it seems unfair to single any one of them out.

Other Notes:

Please note that when I call 2012 "the year we didn't give a damn", I refer strictly to the Best Animated Feature award, because there was a whole lot of exciting stuff going on elsewhere in this ceremony. The Artist was a wonderfully affectionate pastiche on silent cinema and a very worthy Best Picture winner (yeah, I said it), while Best Original Song went to a song about Muppets written by one half of Flight of The Conchords. Flight of The Conchords. Winning for a song about Muppets. How is that not single the greatest thing ever to have happened at the Oscars?

Alas, 2011 was not a strong year for Hollywood animation, and the Academy had clearly struggled to scrape together a halfway decent list of nominees for the 2012 ceremony. As a result, we have what might just be the worst line-up in the award's history to date. Truthfully, none of these films are what you'd call terrible. There's nothing here to rival the soul-sucking wretchedness of Shark Tale or Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. But there's also very little that inspires excitement and, with the sole exception of Chico and Rita, I doubt that most of these would have been nominated at all in a stronger year. Ragtag mediocrity was very much the dominant flavour this time around, and it was difficult to get particularly pumped over who would actually win out of this bunch. I assume the two key factors which led to Rango's victory were a) Hollywood bias and b) the Academy's aversion to sequels/spin-offs (with the exception of Toy Story 3, sequels have a poor track record in this category). Rango, the debut animated feature from long-time visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, is easily the most dubious film ever to have walked away with this award; I saw it back in March 2011 and thought it alright, but it never once occurred to me that I was looking at a Best Animated Feature winner.

I'll give Rango that it's "different" - it doesn't feel as if it's trying to mimic any other model of popular animation, be it DreamWorks, Disney or Pixar, or, gratuitous fart jokes aside, give much consideration to delivering a commercial product at all (it's also surprisingly morbid for a family film - there are a lot of onscreen deaths and visible dead bodies). Unfortunately, "different" does not equate to distinguished, or at least it doesn't in this case. Rango is odd without being particularly engaging, which has to do with its messy narrative, weak lead and overstuffed supporting cast (this film suffers from Too Many Characters Syndrome, where it bombards us with so many different supporting figures that we never really get a chance to know who any of them are). All in all, it's not an amazingly memorable experience, and I suspect that, if not for the Oscar win, people would be questioning if this film even existed or if was just some hazy, half-remembered hallucination they had from lying out too long in the sun. Which seems a more befitting legacy for a film of this nature.

The strongest entry of the bunch, and the film which would have easily owned this if life was fair, was Chico and Rita, a meticulously animated Spanish romantic drama about two young musicians whose lives continuously entwine against the backdrop of the Havana Afro-Cuban/New York jazz scenes of the 1940s and 50s. The film's visual style is absolutely heavenly and the soundtrack is top notch. The film's only misstep is in its schmaltzy Hollywood ending (which nearly had me yelling, "Oh come on!" in a crowded auditorium). Call me a cynic, but to me the heart and soul of this film was never in the romantic thread between Chico and Rita but in the mood and character of the various locations they pass through on their journey. This is something that it captures superbly.

The second foreign entry of the night was Folimage's A Cat In Paris (or Une vie de chat in its native French). I'll confess that my opinion on this film is probably sullied by the fact that I've only ever seen the English dub, and I am willing to believe that the film works a lot better in its original French form. I was enthralled by the charming animation style but in story and character terms I came away with the distinct impression that something had been lost in translation. In the English dub, the loveliness of the animation is frequently offset by the childishness of some of the dialogue, especially whenever the villain is onscreen - in particular, there's a scene where he chews out one of his underlings for offering him the wrong flavour quiche that's awkward, overlong and not very fun to watch. It's a perfectly nice film and absolutely fine for kids, but there's a disappointing lack of adult appeal.

In an unheard of turn of events (for the time), Pixar wound up being shut out from this particular round (see below), while their old rivals at DreamWorks scored two nominations - among them, our second feline-centred nominee of the night, Puss in Boots, a spin-off to a franchise that by now was obstinately refusing to be put out of its misery. I remember when this project was announced all the way back in 2004 (at the time it was widely expected to be a direct to video release). It wasn't the most outlandish idea out there, given that Puss did have quite a fanbase at the time (in fairness, he was the best thing about Shrek 2), but spending a whopping seven years in production meant that when it finally materialised, the world had long since moved on. It arrived way too late to capitalise on the Shrek mania which had been downright formidable in the early mid-00s, and whatever charm Puss had once had as a character had been eroded through his involvement in those last two piddling Shrek sequels. It's also not totally clear whether Puss in Boots is intended as a prequel to the Shrek films or if it's a stand-alone story that takes place in its own separate world and timeline - overlap with the mother series was purposely avoided because it was in development at the same time as Shrek Forever After and no one knew what the hell they were doing with that movie either. Puss in Boots is a more watchable film than either of the latter two Shrek sequels, but no more justified in its existence.

Kung Fu Panda 2 felt like a less arbitrary sequel, in that the original film did actually close with an exploitable loose end - namely, that Po's origins were never addressed. Mind you, in the original, that was kind of the whole point, was it not? It was treated as this unspoken, lightly touching absurdity that a giant panda somehow wound up being raised by a noodle-slicing goose and nobody ever quite gets to the point where they're able to explicitly comment on or question it. Here, we get a scene where Ping mournfully admits to Po that he's not his biological father and Po is all, "pfft, I figured that out ages ago" (congrats on being smarter than Ellie from Ice Age: The Meltdown, Po). Inevitably, the joke loses quite a bit of its charm the instant it becomes explicit. Po gets a sufficiently harrowing backstory, albeit one that lessens its impact by giving pretty much everything away in the opening sequence - this allows for dramatic irony when Po first confronts the genocidal peacock and doesn't quite grasp the magnitude of what he's dealing with, but it also means there's no dramatic tension as Po slowly uncovers the truth, because any reasonably attentive viewer will already be about ten steps ahead of him.


The Snub Club:

Pixar were passed over for the very first time since this category began, which coming after four straight wins in a row certainly raised a few eyebrows - however, given that their contender that year had been Cars 2, their worst received film to date, few but the most diehard of Pixar fans can have been particularly disappointed. I'll confess that Cars 2 is one of only two Pixar films to date I haven't seen (the other being Cars 3) - the original wasn't that great, and it was clear as day that this film was only given the go-ahead because Cars was one of Pixar's biggest merchandise-spinners (John Lasseter good as admitted this in an interview I can no longer find). I can't actually comment on the film itself, but I'm willing to believe that it's as bad as everyone tells me it is.

Also shut out (in this case, to nobody's surprise) were Blue Sky, with their latest offering, Rio. By now it was clear that these guys weren't exactly favourites with the Academy - between Ice Age's nomination in 2003 and Ferdinand's (surprise?) nomination this year, Blue Sky scored a big fat zero number of appearances in this category (although Rio was nominated for Best Original Song). Credit where credit's due, Rio was easily Blue Sky's best film to date, but it's all relative and Blue Sky's best still doesn't get anywhere close to rivalling Pixar's. It has pretty animation, nice music and a villain voiced by the other half of Flight of The Conchords, and there's little in the way of truly obnoxious characters, aside from a bulldog voiced by Tracy Morgan. Unfortunately, the story doesn't break any ground or go anywhere you wouldn't expect it to go. It's pleasant but unremarkable, like most Blue Sky features (exceptions being the Ice Age sequels, which don't even have the virtue of being pleasant). For a long time, Rio was subject to vilification by a lot of Pixar fans, due to speculation that Pixar's recently-shelved project, Newt, was scrapped over concerns that the basic premise (the course of true love not running smoothly between the two last surviving members of a species) was deemed too similar to Rio. Pixar fans were pissed to be living in a timeline where we got Rio instead of Newt. It later transpired that Newt got dumped in favour of starting work on a brand new project, Inside Out, which I think most people would agree was a pretty good trade-off. Besides, it wouldn't have been a totally original premise whichever studio did it first - The Wild Thornberrys already did an episode based on that very scenario (tortoises, in their case).

Having split with DreamWorks Animation following Flushed Away's weak box office returns, Aardman had found brand new bedfellows in the form of Sony, and their first release was a collaborative project with Sony Pictures Animation, Arthur Christmas. Aardman hadn't forsaken their stop motion roots (Pirates! was just around the corner, after all), but they remained open to dabbling with CG animation every once in a while. Sadly, their efforts to start afresh didn't manage to turn things around for them - Arthur Christmas made less money than Flushed Away (albeit on a smaller budget), cementing a pattern in which Aardman would consistently struggle to find an audience stateside (their early success with Chicken Run may well have been a fluke). Which is a shame, because Arthur Christmas is a really solid offering - not one of Aardman's classics, but fun and genial, and buoyed along considerably by its excellent voice cast. I have only one real quibble with the film - Bill Nighy's character is frankly a bit of a psychopath, although the film tries to play him off as a lovable rogue. Was nobody else bothered that he (quite willfully) almost gets Bryony killed twice?