Animation Oscar Bite 2015: Six Heroes In Search of a Yokai

87th Academy Awards - 22nd February 2015

The contenders: Big Hero 6, The Boxtrolls, How To Train Your Dragon 2, Song of The Sea, The Tale of Princess Kaguya

The winner: Big Hero 6

The rightful winner: Song of The Sea

The barrel-scraper: None.

Other notes:

The 2015 ceremony was another of the more controversial years in the history of this award, not so much because of what won as what wasn't nominated in the first place. If there was animated film that tapped into zeitgeist back in 2014, it was The Lego Movie. Many people expected the Warner Bros film, animated by Australian studio Animal Logic (previously of Happy Feet fame) and helmed by directorial duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller (previously responsible for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and at least one big screen take on a nostalgic TV show which the rest of the world loved but I absolutely despised), to lead the pack when it came to Oscar prospects at the start of 2015. Then the nominations were revealed and The Lego Movie hadn't made the cut at all. Imagine the fury on the internets! Many were so outraged that they declared total disinterest in how this year's feature animation award played out.

Among those who stuck around, there was some speculation that the Academy would give this to How To Train Your Dragon 2 on the basis that DreamWorks Animation had been having a really hard time of late and needed all the support they could get. A pity Oscar. For the company who had mopped the floor with Pixar in the historic first year of this award. How are the mighty fallen. (Besides, whatever the merits of How To Train Your Dragon 2, DreamWorks had put out Mr Peabody and Sherman in the very same year. They weren't getting any sympathy from me.)

Overall, most people seemed to lean in favour of DreamWorks tasting victory for the first time in thirteen years, if not out of pity, then because reigning champs Pixar did not release a film in 2014 (The Good Dinosaur was initially intended for a 2014 release but got pushed back due to story development issues), meaning that DreamWorks were free to compete without fear of being overshadowed by their long-time rivals. Personally, though, I didn't buy it. Not to come off as blowing my own horn, but I figured out well in advance that Big Hero 6 was going to come out on top here, and I was amazed that everyone else was apparently so gobsmacked on the night. I had been following this award for long enough to have more-or-less twigged how it tended to work right by now. And one of the first rules of thumb is that DreamWorks don't tend to get a whole lot of love from the Academy. They may have had an early victory in 2002, when Shrek beat Monsters, Inc, but it's evident that the Academy went off them in a very big way around the mid-00s, when it became rarer for their films to even land a nomination. Consider that DreamWorks haven't won this award since Shrek (not counting their win-through-association with Aardman's Curse of The Were-Rabbit in 2006). We all know that Pixar have dominated this award for so long that they've made it very hard for a number of other excellent films to have a look-in, but in DreamWorks' case I doubt that it's simply a matter of them being repeatedly cockblocked by the Academy's pet. The problem with the whole "DreamWorks will win as long as they don't have to compete with Pixar" narrative that everyone seemed to be clinging to in 2015 is that you didn't have go back terribly far - only three years, in fact - to find a precedent that proved exactly the opposite. The 2012 ceremony had nary a Pixar nominee in sight, and DreamWorks had not one, but two films in the running that year, and still they lost to the most random and dubious thing ever to have picked up this award. The fact that people had forgotten that speaks volumes about just how little investment there was in the 2012 nominees. Of course, it's entirely possible that DreamWorks lost because both of their entries that year were sequels (technically Puss in Boots is a spin-off, but close enough), and sequels, with one obvious exception, also don't tend to have much luck with the Academy - either way, the odds were not swinging in How To Train Your Dragon 2's favour.

Heck, you didn't need to go all the way back to 2012; Pixar didn't make the cut in the 2014 ceremony either, and DreamWorks still lost out to another old rival, Disney. Perhaps people didn't think much of it because it was one of DreamWorks' lesser offerings, The Croods, up against an absolute juggernaut in Frozen. At the time, Frozen was the only precedent for a Disney film winning this award (again, we we're not counting wins-through-association with their buddies at Pixar), but it was enough for me. The Academy had smiled favorably on a Disney animation only last year. They hadn't smiled favourably on DreamWorks in thirteen years. There were, of course, three other nominations from very respectable studios in the running - Cartoon Saloon, Laika, Studio Ghibli - but I'd learned by now that the Academy prefers to give this award to the big name studios. I decided that Big Hero 6 had to win this. And lo and behold.

(Yeah, I did say I wasn't going to blow my horn, but let me have this one. For once I got to experience the thrill of being the little guy no one listened to who proved to be remarkably prescient.)

As noted, by now I had been playing this game for long enough to have drawn up a formula. So without further ado I present to you Scampy's rules of thumb for determining a Best Animated Feature winner. Remember, these are only rules of thumb, not hard rules, so occasionally you might see some deviations, and particular trends identified here may be subject to change over time. For the time, though, I think the following pointers will generally prove quite reliable.

1) Follow that Luxo lamp, but consider what's on offer. There's a myth that Pixar always win this award. In reality, Pixar have a very strong track record, but the Academy does also have a tendency to punish them when they get it wrong. Pixar are unlikely to win with any of the following: films about talking cars, prequels and sequels (Toy Story 3 being a major exception), or a film so weak and misdirected in general that nobody even notices it's there (we're talking The Good Dinosaur levels of weak). In fact, such Pixar entries will often struggle to scrape a nomination.

2) Alternatively, follow the mouse. This one has taken a number years to materialise, chiefly because the award's genesis coincided with Disney's wandering off into the wilderness in the last crazy years under Michael Eisner, and it took them a long time to get back on course. But in recent years Disney have been building up a strong track record, and they now have the second highest number of wins for any studio in this category. Disney still have a way to go before they'll match Pixar's whopping total, but it's clear that the Academy feels favorably about them in their current state.

3) Don't back DreamWorks. Like, don't. DreamWorks Animation have only ever won once, in the very first year of the award. Back in the early 00s, when we were just coming out of Disney's 1990s Renaissance and feeling mighty bored with it, people found Shrek's cynicism (some would say spitefulness) refreshing, and it seems that the Academy were also won over by this in 2002. But in subsequent years, DreamWorks burned off a lot of that goodwill by wearing the same formula down to the ground, and much of what people responded to about the original Shrek - the hip cultural references, the in-your-face celebrity voiceovers, the gross-out fart gags - quickly came to seem obnoxious and pandering. To their credit, DreamWorks have attempted to develop and expand their output post-Shrek, with extremely mixed results, but the damage to their brand was clearly done. I'm not saying that DreamWorks can never win again, but they're not Academy favourites. (While we're at it, Blue Sky and Illuminations are also big names with a poor track record, but they seldom get nominated at all - recent changes to the voting process might give them an easier ride in the future, however.)

4) The little guys are bound to get stepped on. Hollywood bias plays an enormous role in determining who wins at the Academy Awards, and the Best Animated Feature award is no exception. To date, only one foreign language film, Spirited Away, has ever won this award. We've had a British winner (Curse of The Were-Rabbit) and an Australian winner (Happy Feet), but these both had the backing of a major Hollywood studio. Foreign films and films from smaller US studios rarely triumph because the Academy prefers to back the big name brands (plus, odds are that the people who actually vote on these things haven't even seen the smaller stuff). Laika, Cartoon Saloon and Studio Ghibli are responsible for some of the finest animated films in recent years, yet whenever you see them competing in this award they're usually just window dressing. Ah well, it's an honour just being nominated, right?

5) A wild card can win, but only in times of drought. Wild card winners in the past have included Animal Logic's Happy Feet and Industrial Light & Magic's Rango. Both of these were very atypical winners in many respects, not least because they were from animation studios without a big or established brand name. However, both of these films triumphed in years where the output of Hollywood animation in general was mediocre at best. As much as I love Happy Feet, I think it seriously lucked out in that the Pixar film it had to compete against was Cars.

6) Originality matters. To date, only one sequel, Toy Story 3, has ever won this award. Toy Story 3 was an exceptionally well-received sequel, of course, but it's also clear that the Academy isn't terribly impressed with how reliant Pixar have become on sequels and prequels in the aftermath and now has an established tendency not to invite them at all whenever they fail to turn in something original. DreamWorks have had more luck than Pixar in getting their sequels nominated, but as we've established, DreamWorks stopped winning a long time ago.

7) Be leery of internet hype. The bane of many a Wreck-It Ralph or Lego Batman Movie fan's existence - what goes down well with internet fan communities won't necessarily reflect what resonates with the Academy. In short, don't expect something to triumph on the basis of an enthusiastic following.

8) Topicality helps. I believe this is partially what gave Zootopia the edge at the 2017 awards. I'd note that films with an environmental message (Spirited Away, Happy Feet, Wall-E) also have a very strong showing here.

As to what I believe should have won the 2015 award, in an ideal world - Cartoon Saloon's Song of The Sea. I was blown away by it, for much the same reasons I was blown away by The Secret of Kells five years prior. Big Hero 6 was fine, although a bit on the vanilla side for Nu-Renaissance Disney. Though I liked it more than Wreck-It Ralph.


The Snub Club:

So, The Lego Movie - yeah, it was a lark, a joyful grab bag of non sequiturs with a surprisingly tender conclusion, and overall a lot better than most of us would reasonably have expected from a film called The Lego Movie. I suspect a key reason behind its lack of nomination was because, no matter how much admiration it garnered, it remained a feature film based off a popular toy line, and that's something I really don't see the Academy going for. I saw a number of sentiments along the lines of, "What is this sea princess crap I've never heard of and why was it nominated over The Lego Movie?", but personally I really appreciate that this category has consistently managed to acknowledge a broad range of animation styles, given smaller indie productions some due recognition and isn't necessarily guided by the flavour of the month (on the whole, I think the Academy have done a good job in selecting worthy nominees for this award, although that's something I fear may have broken down in light of recent changes) - besides, I still haven't forgiven Lord and Miller for the 109 minutes I lost on 21 Jump Street (did I mention how much I hated that film?), so I find it hard to feel terribly outraged on their behalf about this one. Nevertheless, it was a move which rubbed many people the wrong way, and The Lego Movie remains the most controversial snub in the history of this award.

I mentioned in point No. 3 that DreamWorks had been trying hard to broaden their output since the days of Shark Tale and Madagascar and in the past few years we had seen the full spectrum - How To Train Your Dragon is a great film, Rise of The Guardians is a noble failure and Mr Peabody and Sherman is a pretty sorry misfire. A well-intentioned but not very successful attempt to update Peabody's Improbable History, Jay Ward's mid-century low budgeter about a time-traveling beagle and his naive young human sidekick, it makes a number of well-intentioned but not very successful changes to its source, which I can comprehend without actually getting behind. Peabody and Sherman's relationship has undergone a big touchy-feely upgrade (remember what a bitch Peabody was to Sherman in the original cartoon?), Sherman is now explicitly Peabody's adopted son (in the original, Peabody regarded Sherman more as a pet) and the film attempts to play them off as some kind of metaphor for the modern family. I appreciate that this was all done in the interests of giving the film an emotional centre, but it comes at the expense of everything that made the characters' dynamic funny in the first place. Meanwhile, the attempts to turn Peabody into a hip and happenin' hound for the YouTube generation leave an inevitably sour taste, particularly at the start of the film when Peabody claims to have invented planking (I don't know about you, but for me that's more than enough evidence that he's an unfit guardian for Sherman).

DreamWorks' third offering of the year was The Penguins of Madagascar, another spin-off in the Puss in Boots mold. If you've been following this retrospective then you're aware of just how deeply I loathed that franchise's mother film. Of all the films I've dismissed and grumbled about along the way, I honestly can't say that I took the negative experience half as personally as I did with Madagascar (well, except maybe Frankenweenie). In the succeeding years I've made a point of steering well clear of the sequels, and yet I was actually prepared to give this one a chance, since I figured that it might be halfway tolerable minus those stupid zoo animals and that godawful thing voiced by Sacha Baron Cohen. And halfway tolerable is about right - the film moves at such a constant, breakneck pace that it never allows the story or the characters room to settle, but as a time-killing fluff piece it's agreeable enough. And I did get a laugh out of one gag involving a special agent squad of Arctic fauna called North Wind, whose battle cry is, "No one breaks The Wind!" Well, I've lost all credibility. Moving on...

Blue Sky decided to try their hand at spinning out another franchise to complement their Ice Age series, and maybe cash in on the 2014 World Cup while they were at it - hence, there was Rio 2. At one point, there was whisper about a Rio 3, but that has yet to materialise, and I'm not overly surprised because Rio 2 was a sequel with absolutely nothing to add to the original (other than increasing the genetic diversity of the blue macaws and removing the implication at the end of the first film that Blu and Jewel's children were ultimately forced to commit incest in order to keep their species alive). Can we talk about the fact that this film has no plot - or rather, that it has lots of teeny-tiny micro plots which have been stitched together in a messy, ugly patchwork of narrative dead-ends? It's a case of there being so much going on that in effect nothing very much is going on. Also, Blu and Jewel's offspring are a trio of properly brash little brats that you just want to see scarfed by an anaconda. Nice to see Jemaine Clement back as Nigel, but again, he has little to do other than wander around with a frog and an anteater and give a corrupted rendition "I Will Survive" at one point, and it's kind of obvious that he was shoehorned in precisely because he was one of the brighter things about the original.

Also in the sequels/weird spin-offs department, we had Planes: Fire & Rescue. I clearly owe the original Planes an apology because I plain forgot that it came out a year earlier in 2013. The mere existence of this series is somewhat interesting in that it's a spin-off of Pixar's Cars franchise, made not by Pixar themselves but by DisneyToon Studios, who were responsible for all those DTV Disney cheapquels which were a staple of supermarket aisles at the dawn of the millennium. Perhaps this is a glimpse into how Circle 7's films might have turned out had Disney and Pixar not been able to salvage relations in the mid-00s. I couldn't tell you if it's any good or not, because I've yet to have the pleasure of Planes. A spin-off based on Pixar's least appealing creation (well, back in 2014) by the same studio who made all those DTV Disney cheaquels never sounded all that enticing to me.