88th Academy Awards - 28th February 2016
The contenders: Anomalisa, Boy and The World, Inside Out, The Shaun The Sheep Movie, When Marnie Was There
The winner: Inside Out
The rightful winner: Inside Out
The barrel-scraper: NONE. This is the purest line-up in the history of this award.
Other notes:
We all know that 2016 was an absolute horror show of a year, but one element which remained entirely spotless during our descent into the abyss was the list of nominees for Best Animated Feature. When I first laid sight upon this list, I could feel myself welling up from sheer euphoria. This is a phenomenally good line-up - there have been years where I'd thought that all of the nominees were at the very least worthy (the years where I wasn't able to single out any particularly obvious barrel-scraping entries), but 2016 is the only year to date where I''m able to look at the full list of nominees and say, without question, that yes, I love absolutely every one of these films and think that each has something truly unique and magnificent to offer.
Having said that, there was never any doubt in my heart as to which of the five I wanted to see triumph. There's some exemplary stuff going on among the foreign/indie entries in this list, but once again I found my allegiances siding unapologetically with the Hollywood juggernauts at Pixar. Inside Out was a welcome return to form for them following their creatively dry spell in the early 2010s, one which I'd say even surpasses the glorious Fountain Age of 2007 to 2009. Curiously, when 2015 began I recall a lot of people speculating that this would be Blue Sky's big year - that The Peanuts Movie would be the animated film that everybody talked about and would go on to win the Best Animated Feature Oscar at the 2016 ceremony. With hindsight, I find it amazing that expectations for Inside Out were apparently so low from the outset. The teaser trailer was very divisive, as it initially gave the impression that the film might be full of tired sitcom quips about gender stereotypes ("Did you ever notice how men always leave the toilet seat up? That's the joke!"), but I think that initially people just had a hard time wrapping their heads around how this particular synopsis was going to play out. Inside Out is based on a very abstract concept - certainly, it was Pixar's most ambitious and cerebral to date - and people either couldn't picture it or thought that it sounded more like the kind of educational tool a child psychologist would give to their patients than something that could captivate the multiplex set. In fact, when I'd first learned that there were two original Pixar films in development for the mid 2010s (amid the slightly worrying influx of sequels and prequels), I think that my interest initially gravitated a lot more toward The Good Dinosaur (the irony!) simply because there was so little to go on for Inside Out at the time. For a while, all we really knew was that it "took place inside the mind of a little girl", and how the hell was I supposed to get excited over something like that? I couldn't even begin to visualise it. A ploughman dinosaur at least gave my expectations something they could work with.
Then summer of 2015 came and Inside Out turned out to be something really very special. This was Pixar at the very top of their game - intelligent, heartfelt, willing to push boundaries and deftly capable of appealing to children and adults alike; kids will enjoy the colourful adventures of Joy and Sadness as they traverse the inner workings of Riley's mind, while adults will find additional resonance in the subtext about a waning childhood and the onset of adolescence. Given Pixar's track record, it was also refreshing to see them take such a female-centric route for a change - Brave had already claimed the distinction of being the first Pixar film with a female protagonist, but Inside Out was their first to have a female-majority cast. Of course, there were a few killjoys out there who insisted that this so-called Pixar "original" was actually a rip-off of a 1990s sitcom called Herman's Head (which I only knew existed prior because Lisa mentioned it in an episode of The Simpsons) or British comic strip The Numskulls (which I had encountered a few times in my childhood and recognised that Pixar's film shared a few superficial similarities with, although nothing which had me losing sleep), but I paid them no mind. It's true that there's nothing amazingly original about the whole "individual person is actually a composite of lots of little beings working behind the scenes" set-up - I mean, Woody Allen did an R-rated version in the final segment of his 1972 film Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask) - but Inside Out approaches the concept with such a deep, thoughtful sincerity (one that draws from the research of psychologist Paul Ekman) that takes it well beyond the realm of quirky novelty and gets to grips with some of the weightier implications of such a notion. And the film's message is an unusual one. Oh sure, there's no shortage of children's media that teaches that it's perfectly fine, normal and healthy to feel sad, scared, angry, etc, but I can't think of many others which go so in-depth in exploring how our emotions, even the ones we don't traditionally think of as desirable, enable us to function on a day to day basis, and to grow and develop as people. A real shame that that rumored Best Picture nomination never materialised; it was certainly a lot better than that film about the kid in the room.
I have to admit that I felt a wee bit nervous about Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa because I'd seen the "quirky Indiewood director makes the transition to stop motion animation" scenario before with Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox and I did not like the results one bit. But I think it worked out a whole lot better in Kaufman's case (partly because, due to the nature of the project, Kaufman has none of Anderson's smug pretensions about subverting a children's classic). I will say that Anomalisa possibly holds the record for the most misleading and unrepresentative trailer I've ever seen - it was structured around a phony-baloney motivational speech given by the film's protagonist, and all without the slightest hint of irony, making it look as if this would be an uplifting film about a middle-aged man who finds renewed purpose in life. If you came to Anomalisa hoping for something warm and life-affirming then you were sorely out of luck. Which is not to say that it's not an immensely moving experience. There's been a lot of discussion as to the meaning of the film's cryptic ending, and my own perspective would be that it has something to do with Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. I hesitate to say that, because you can literally explain away anything as having to do with Heaven, Hell or Purgatory (it's the second most annoying interpretation of Mulholland Drive, right after the "Betty's life was all a dream!" reading), but that is the symbolism I genuinely take from the film's closing sequences. At any rate, I'd do think there's a definite Heaven and Hell allusion with regard to the respective end points of the two main characters.
Elsewhere, The Shaun The Sheep Movie gave Aardman their strongest film in a decade (confession time: I never got into the Shaun The Sheep TV series, partly because I always found Shaun's canine sidekick to be inexplicably loathsome, so it's no small feat that I warmed to the film as much as I did), while Studio Ghibli scored another enchanting classic with When Marnie Was There. Back in 2014 there were a lot of rumors circulating that this would be Ghibli's final feature film, as the company had recently announced that it would be taking a break following Miyazaki's supposed retirement (although a lot of the "Ghibli is dead!" narrative seemed to spring more from what the Western media was reporting than any actual Japanese sources, which always made it seem slightly suspect to me). But nope, Miyazaki can never seem to stay retired for long, and there's currently a whole new Ghibli film in the works. A good thing too - a world without Ghibli would be an infinitely poorer one.
I was lucky enough to catch the final nominee, the Brazilian Boy and The World, back in 2014 when it was first making the film festival rounds; back then, I described it as a sort of combination of Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Susan Young's 1987 short film Carnival, marrying the visual poetry and mounting chaos of the former with the colour and vibrancy of the latter. I love Koyaanisqatsi and I love Carnival, but even then I'm not sure if the comparison quite does it justice. Let's just say it's one of the most beautiful visual feasts I've ever had the pleasure of seeing on the big screen, and since 2014 I've been itching to revisit it, and frustrated by its lack of accessibility in my portion of the globe. There's also hardly any dialogue - which is handy, because the screening I attended did not have subtitles. Then again, I understand that the two or three lines of Portuguese dialogue that were there were actually rendered backwards...so if any kind soul can clue me in on what was said, I'd be thankful.
The Snub Club:
2015 was the first year in which Pixar released two features - in addition to Inside Out, we got The Good Dinosaur, which was bumped back from its intended 2014 release for an extensive last minute story overhaul. It is somewhat ironic that Pixar wound up releasing its best and its worst film to date within five months of one another, just to remind us of the heights they could soar to but also just how royally they could screw things up.* What works about The Good Dinosaur? Nothing works. It's a complete failure. It's such a wretched misfire from top to bottom that I don't even know where to begin in unpicking it, but let's go with this: I was reminded a lot of Rock-a-Doodle, in that, if you squint, you can just about make out the aborted story they had to manically overhaul at the eleventh hour. The opening sequence makes a point of establishing that we're in an alternate universe where the asteroid narrowly missed Earth and the dinosaurs never went extinct, and then the film proceeds to do sod-all with that particular scenario. Oh sure, humans and dinosaurs wind up inhabiting the same plane of existence, but then many fictional depictions of prehistory are happy to ignore paleontological accuracy anyway, and while the dinosaurs here are civilised enough to have gone into agriculture, it honestly doesn't feel any different to the kind of anthropomorphism you'd encounter in any animated critter flick. In the end, that opening sequence feels so irrelevant that it's easier to view it as the film's pivotal set-piece, the dinosaurs' disinterested reaction being the punchline, and the rest of the film as some random epilogue you can readily skip. On top of everything else, The Good Dinosaur was not made (or at least retooled) by people who seem particularly passionate about dinosaurs. Whereas Inside Out did a wonderful job in constructing a unique world and story around the fact that its main characters were personified emotions, The Good Dinosaur doesn't really delve much into the whole dinosaur theme. Heck, this exact same story could just as easily have taken place in contemporary New Zealand; make Arlo a sheep and Spot a possum and you'd have to change very little else about the plot.
There are many more bones I have to pick with The Good Dinosaur, but I'm conscious of length, so I'll restrict myself to just one more - at the end of the film, Arlo proves his manhood (dinosaurhood?) by killing a wounded enemy in the process of retreating. Holy shit, that's the kind of thing I would expect to see in one of those McBain parodies on The Simpsons, not played entirely straight in a Pixar film. Pixar, lads, whatever was up?
Meanwhile, following a recent string of box office meltdowns, DreamWorks Animation were at the point where they were having scale back a little; whereas their previous strategy was to release two or three features every year, 2015 saw only one - Home, which starred a purple alien thing voiced by Jim Parsons and..ugh, sorry DreamWorks, but you've already lost me there. Just bring on Kung Fu Panda 3 already.
Oh, and after all that early buzz The Peanuts Movie came and went and didn't leave much of a dent in the end. Critical reception was warm enough but on the whole people didn't seem to care or even notice that the film was there, and the international box office was pretty mediocre. Personally, I've still not seen it, though I'm told that it's respectful to its source and actually pretty good by Blue Sky's standards. Still, 2015 definitely wasn't Blue Sky's year, and 2016 wouldn't be much better - their flagship franchise was poised to crash and burn quite messily. Ah well, 2016 was a hard year on everyone, Blue Sky.
* Although keep in mind that I haven't seen Cars 2 or Cars 3. If those are worse than The Good Dinosaur then...oh dear.
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