Animation Oscar Bite 2018: The Remains of The Day

90th Academy Awards - 4th March 2018

The contenders: The Boss Baby, The Breadwinner, Coco, Ferdinand, Loving Vincent

The winner: Coco

The rightful winner: The Breadwinner

The barrel-scraper: The Boss Baby, Ferdinand

If you logged onto social media on 23rd January 2018, shortly after the nominees were announced for the 90th Academy Awards ceremony, you might have noticed that the nominees for Best Animated Feature were subjected to an unusual amount of ridicule. I got in on that (kind of) when I declared it to be the worst line-up since the 2012 ceremony. With hindsight that may have been a mite unfair of me. Certainly, I do not think the line-up here is quite comparable to that of the 2012 awards, in which the majority of entries were the kind of mediocre fare that would have certainly been passed over in a stronger year. Here, that's not the case, because three out of the five nominees are absolutely outstanding. Coco, Loving Vincent, The Breadwinner - all terrific. No, I think it's more about the fact that there were two very egregious nominees in there, each exemplifying Hollywood at its most soullessly mediocre. DreamWorks' Animation's The Boss Baby was on the receiving end of nearly all of the ridicule, with many taking the internets to proclaim their disbelief that the film was now officially up Oscar consideration, although I'll wager that a good percentile of the people dispensing such mockery hadn't even seen the film and were just chiming in on the basis of the trailer, which made the film look mindless as fuck. Which is not to say that The Boss Baby is actually good, mind, or smarter than its trailer would suggest, but at the same time I can understand why some people might enjoy it, on the basis that it is so mindless, stupid and anything-goes that it scores points as an alternative to heavy hallucinogenics (I fessed up to liking Rock-a-Doodle, so I'm hardly one to judge). An Oscar contender, though? Get out.

The second mediocre entry was largely ignored in all of this, presumably because Ferdinand itself attracted virtually no attention during its ill-fated run at the holiday box office (it chose to open on the exact same day as The Last Jedi; what the hell did it expect?). But to me it actually stuck out as the more glaring example, because while DreamWorks Animation have never really had much clout when it comes to winning this award, Blue Sky have been dead to them since almost as far back as the award began. And now suddenly the floodgates were re-opened to them, and for Ferdinand of all films. Ferdinand was Blue Sky's first film to be nominated for this award since the studio's debut feature, Ice Age, all the way back in 2003, so if you hadn't been keeping up with their output you might take that to mean that Ferdinand was their strongest film in a while. Erm, no. Ferdinand is as boring, safe and vanilla as Blue Sky gets - there is literally nothing about it that conveys any growth or development as a studio since the days of Robots and Ice Age 2. Rio and Epic, while not Pixar-worthy efforts, did at least have more character and ambition going for them than Ferdinand.

If I seem particularly hard on Ferdinand, it's because I desperately wanted for it to have been better. If nothing else, then Ferdinand does have an enormously positive message, one that you don't tend to see a whole lot of in Hollywood, period (given that it's making a statement on violence and toxic masculinity). A shame, then, that it doesn't have a strong story to back it up. It betrays what an inordinate amount of rewrites it underwent by just how awkwardly everything therein pieces together, from the odd, unconvincing manner in which a young Ferdinand is exiled from his ranch only to be hauled back within the first thirty minutes, to the curious lack of focus given to what the film keeps insisting is at heart of the story; that is, Ferdinand's relationship with his adoptive human family (we barely even see the people in question; the same goes for Ferdinand's passion of flowers, which here plays more like an incidental trait than anything especially pivotal to the character's motivations). There's one character who, much like Chief from Disney's The Fox and The Hound, was presumably killed off in earlier drafts of the script but lives in the finished film (somewhat implausibly) so as not to disturb the kids in the audience. And some of Blue Sky's very worst habits come creeping in yet again. Lupe the goat is the kind of tortuously annoying side character one encounters all-too-often in their productions (granted, it is unusual for the odious comic relief to be female, but that doesn't make Lupe any less unbearable). By comparison, the trio of crayola-coloured hedgehogs are cute and not overly intrusive, although they are the subject of an increasingly irritating running gag in which they're repeatedly mistaken for another species altogether and have to indignantly remind us that they are, didn't ya know, hedgehogs. The reason why this gag annoyed me so is because it was blatantly implemented on the assumption that American audiences might not recognise a hedgehog when they see one, given that they are not indigenous to the New World. Which is all well and good, but you have to remember that this particular story is set in Spain, and the Spaniards know damned well what hedgehogs are.

As previously noted, before the 2018 ceremony the Academy implemented a few changes to the voting process for Best Animated Feature, which animation news site Cartoon Brew predicted would make it easier for mainstream productions to hog the proceedings in future ceremonies. It seems that Blue Sky was indeed a beneficiary of these changes. Having said that, 2017 was kind of a weak year for Hollywood animation all-round, and it's not as if this award hasn't always had a very visible bias toward mainstream productions. So I'm not sure how much difference it really made in the end. In the (relatively short) history of this award, there have only ever been two nominees which I consider so soul-grindingly wretched that they had no business being invited to the Oscars in the first place, and they are Shark Tale and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (both which were nominated in the early years of the award, when the animation industry was still so small that pretty much all you had to do was show up). Everything else I could just about give the benefit of the doubt (I've got problems with Fantastic Mr Fox and Frankenweenie, but I can at least appreciate the craftmanship that went into those films on a technical level). But all the same, we have consistently seen quite a lot of mediocre entries get through, apparently on the basis that the Academy has to meet its quota for Hollywood representation before it can give foreign and indie flicks a look-in. Were The Boss Baby and Ferdinand's nominations really so egregious when you consider that Despicable Me 2, The Croods and Puss in Boots (and A Cat in Paris, just to prove that mediocrity isn't an exclusively Hollywood thing) were all nominated not so long ago? Perhaps it's more a case that we've been absolutely spoiled for great line-ups within the last two or three years. Perhaps. I guess we'll have to wait until the 2019 ceremony to see if this was merely a brittle year or if there are some worrying changes in the air. If the new rules mean that little-known gems like Boy and The World and My Life as a Courgette probably wouldn't be nominated in the future...well, that's a crying shame.

Of the three outstanding nominees, it was a tough call settling on my personal pick for rightful winner, because I think they're all pretty great. Coco is fun and heartwarming in the very best Pixar tradition and with it we have the magic and excitement of getting to explore an entirely new, freshly-realised world (I'm aware there was another animated film based around Dia de Muertos a few years back called The Book of Life, which I haven't seen so I can't compare how similar its treatment of the subject is to Coco, but certainly Coco looks and feels entirely different to every Pixar film before it). Loving Vincent, likewise, was a sublime experience from start to finish. But in the end I'm going with The Breadwinner. I came to it primarily for the gorgeous animation animation (courtesy of the ever-reliable souls at Ireland's Cartoon Saloon, along with Aircraft Pictures in Canada and Melusine Productions in Luxembourg), but I wound up getting so invested in the story and characters. I'm not exaggerating when I say there wasn't a single second in which I felt bored or my attention wandering, I was so on the edge of my seat the entire time wanting to know what would happen next. The Breadwinner does close on a very open-ended note, which might not be to all all tastes, but given the setting it would probably be a tad disingenuous to have gone with an ending in which everything was cut and dried. Am I surprised that it lost to Coco? Nah, I'm well-accustomed to how this whole process works by now. This was one heck of an easy outcome to call.

I am full of praise for Coco, although if I did have one nitpick with it (and be warned, we are getting into spoiler territory here) it's that if you didn't see the plot twist coming a mile away, you blatantly haven't seen enough Pixar. By now, it's a pretty solid rule of thumb that if a Pixar character is on the old side, patriarchal and widely respected then he's not to be trusted. Pixar do love their "surprise villains", but it's not really much of a surprise when they keep playing the same card over and over, now is it? Actually, check that - my main criticism of Coco is that I didn't much care for the means by which the villain's ill-deeds were made public knowledge...in that it struck me as reminiscent of how the villain's ill-deeds were made public knowledge in Zootopia, which itself borrowed heavily from how the villain in Monsters, Inc inadvertently gave themselves away. In all three cases, the resolution hinges on the villain conveniently choosing to blurt out the details of their nefarious schemes with no regard to who else might be listening, and the more that Disney and Pixar keep going back to this particular plot device, the less plausible I find it that the villain would actually be stupid or careless enough to fall for it.

The Snub Club:

A lot of people were sour because once again, and even with the revised voting process, the Lego movies (there were two in 2017) had zero joy in being nominated (note: this sourness was largely on behalf of The Lego Batman Movie, which many consider to be a pretty good movie, and not The Lego Ninjago Movie, which was widely dismissed as a hollow cash-in). Myself, I went to see The Lego Batman Movie with my parents and it was a bewildering experience all-round. Afterwards, when my dad said to me, "You know, that had a very odd message for a children's film. It seemed to be saying that good and evil need one another," I couldn't help but agree. What exactly was supposed to be the takeaway from that particular arc? But then it seemed to me that The Lego Batman Movie had a whole shit-ton of half-baked and broken morals. For example, am I the only one who felt sorry for all those non-Batman villains stuck in the Phantom Zone? Granted, they were bent on eating the Joker initially, but once he'd persuaded them to come over to his side they were 100% loyal to him, and the Joker repays their solidarity by ditching them the instant they cease to be of use to him. Then again, that's entirely in keeping with this particular Joker, who betrays the other Gotham City villains early on by turning them into the law, and then at the end of the film they all just welcome him back with open arms and his treachery is never brought up (I didn't see the Joker apologise to any of them, did you?). And to top it all off he flirts openly with Batman right in front of Harley Quinn. This Joker is a DOUCHE, man. That wouldn't be problem, except the movie kind of wants us to see the Joker as a victim and Batman as the one who's in the wrong. Huh. Although, speaking of so-called villains who were actually the victims of their particular narrative, what is King Kong doing in the Phantom Zone, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Voldemort, Saruman and every other iconic villain Warner Bros currently has the rights to? King Kong isn't a bad guy, he's just a big gorilla who behaved exactly as a giant gorilla would be expected to behave when you pluck it out of its natural habitat and chain it up to be gawked at by a bunch of slack-jawed yokels. As Homer Simpson so succinctly put it, "It's so unfair! Just because he's different!"

(Note: My mother agreed with me on King Kong. She was also upset that the shark from Jaws was in the Phantom Zone, pointing out that it's not his fault that he ate people, seeing as how he's a shark and he was only ever acting on instinct. You can see how this film inspired some spirited debate among my family.)

As for the two films I believe should have nominated in place of The Boss Baby and Ferdinand, that's a no-brainer - Japan's In This Corner of The World and Spain's Birdboy: The Forgotten Children were both excellent, and had those two made the cut instead then this would have been a nominees list to rival the line-up for the 2016 ceremony. That would have made Coco the sole mainstream Hollywood production in the running, however, so it was never going to happen. Again, I have to question how great a difference those changes to the voting procedure actually made for either of these films - non-Ghibli Japanese animations do have a very poor track record with this award (many thought that Your Name would be a shoo-in for the 2017 ceremony, yet it failed to scrape a nomination), so what chance did In This Corner of The World stand? Meanwhile, Birdboy was probably always too dark and demented for the Academy's tastes (since it's about animal drug addicts struggling to survive on an island ravaged by industrial disaster - not for nothing to do I refer to it as Threads meets Zootopia).

Not much else of note happened in 2017. Pixar did another Cars sequel (despite there being absolutely no demand for one) and once again I gave it a miss. Actually, I have heard that Cars 3 is a lot better than Cars 2, and that Cars 3 does everything in its power to make you forget there ever was a Cars 2. If that's really the case, then why did they call it Cars 3? Oh, and there was also something called The Emoji Movie which seemed to get everyone's bile boiling, but I'm still doing my darndest to ignore that one.


Afterward:

That's it for Animation Oscar Bite for now. We'll pick this up again after the 91st Academy Awards ceremony in 2019. Until then, and as promised, here's my personal ranking of all of the winners to date from best to worst:

1. Inside Out
2. Ratatouille
3. Up
4. Spirited Away
5. Wall-E
6. Coco
7. The Incredibles
8. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of The Were-Rabbit
9. Finding Nemo
10. Happy Feet
11. Frozen
12. Toy Story 3
13. Brave
14. Zootopia
15. Big Hero 6
16. Shrek
17. Rango


The most cheated film never to have won this award:

Still Monsters, Inc. My all-time favourite losing entry is Moana, but losing to Zootopia is somewhat less egregious than losing to Shrek.

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.

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.

Somewhere Down the Line (2014)

Somewhere Down the Line from Julien Regnard on Vimeo.

Somewhere Down the Line (2014) is a film by Julien Regnard that thematically recalls Old Fangs (2009), an earlier Cartoon Saloon short directed by Adrien Meirgeau and Alan Holly, in its exploration of coming of age, family turmoil and estranged relations, but with a more optimistic outcome. Like Old Fangs, which tracked an anthropomorphic wolf's trek into the deep dark woods of repressed childhood angst in an attempt to be reconciled with his bestial father, Somewhere Down the Line uses the visual metaphor of the journey to convey the emotional distance created between two soul pulled down different courses in life. Here, a man's progression from childhood to old age is represented as a literal car journey, the various relationships he forges and breaks within that time being illustrated in the succession of passengers he picks up and abandons along the way. There is no sense of destination to the journey; for the most part, its purpose is simply to move away from situations that have turned either sour or stale, to leave the past behind and venture out into the unknown in the hopes that something better lies ahead. Crucially, the protagonist's journey is entirely one-way; from the moment he ditches his quarrelsome parents he becomes a man perpetually on the run, learning how to abandon loved ones and never look back, until finally he winds up on the receiving end of that very abandonment.

Somewhere Down the Line contains little discernible dialogue, relying strongly on mood and atmosphere to convey the inner condition of its characters. It does so in a manner that underscores both the beauty of the surrounding landscapes and the quiet desolation of the journey. The road the protagonist travels is shown to be endless and largely uneventful, with long stretches in which we see nary a sign of other vehicles or human life. There is an apprehensiveness to the journey, a sense that one is driven to form attachments to fellow travelers simply to stave off that overwhelming isolation. Like Old Fangs, Somewhere Down the Line makes eye-catching use of colour and lighting to characterise the various stages of the journey and how this translates into personal progression (or regression) in the character's lifespan. The film is structured around an obvious symbolism involving the cycle of the seasons, signalling not only the temporal stages of the protagonist's life but also his emotional development in terms of his ability to connect with others. We open in the cold dead of winter, where the toxic relations between the protagonist's parents and his own entrapment as a helpless spectator to their non-stop quarreling are reflected in the thick layer of snow that has engulfed the surrounding countryside. Once the protagonist, still a young child, has seized the initiative to take control of the car and go his own way, the bleak grey of the skies gives way to a warmer, gentler glow. In learning not to be emotionally reliant on his parents, he enjoys the promise of freedom ahead, yet the persistent snow and ice suggest that his hurting and general reluctance to let others get close has persisted into adolescence/adulthood. It is only once he has pulled over and offered help to a group of young travelers whose own vehicle has broken down that we clear signs of this frigid atmosphere shifting; as he finds himself in the company of others and is implied to form a particularly strong bond with the mustached young man who takes the passenger seat beside him, the snow around him finally thaws. When this friendship is subsequently traded in for the promise of a romantic relationship with a young woman whose vehicle is out of commission, the green spring ambience continues to flourish; while it came at the cost of betraying his buddy and leaving him stranded, the protagonist's life has never been more alive with hope and the possibility of renewal. In both cases, the forging of a new bond, the emotional dependency upon another individual, offers promise but does not come without its degree of risk, as signified in the dark passage the protagonist takes through a forest once his new friends have joined the ride and, more saliently, the overturned car he later passes with his newfound love. The obvious pitfall is that the fresh hope birthed from their youthful union will one day give way to the same bitterness and anger that came to define his parents' relationship; for now, though, the young couple are at the peak of their passion, heading into a tunnel and emerging with a child in the backseat (could there be a clearer metaphor?) into the warm embrace of a bright, brilliant summer.

There is trouble ahead, however, for very soon the skies are darkening yet again and autumn sets in with the relationship between the protagonist and his partner beginning to mirror that of his parents before him. Their daughter can only observe helplessly as their increasingly rocky interaction transforms into physical turbulence, with the car swerving dangerously off-course and the bloodied gash on the side of the woman's face carrying the implicit suggestion of domestic violence (although less implicit than the device used in Old Fangs). At this stage, in a rare instance where we see a second vehicle appear on the road, the protagonist himself becomes the one left behind. Unable to repair his defunct vehicle, he is forced to continue his journey on foot, at which point the surrounding landscape once again falls under the grip of winter, signifying not only the protagonist's transitioning into old age but also his return to a state of complete isolation. This time, the isolation is born not of a desire for independence but of others choosing to shun him. Without a vehicle of his own, he finds himself enfeebled and at the mercy of others, and his efforts to hitch a ride with other motorists are ignored. Finally, help arrives in the form of a young female motorist who pulls over and allows him to share her car. Amid her display of tender compassion, turning up the car heater on noticing how cold he is, he becomes aware of the wooden horse dangling from her rear view mirror, and the film ends on his moment of realisation that he has shared a car with this individual once before. It is, of course, the same horse held by his daughter earlier on in the film, but we might recall that the horse's presence goes back even further, to when the protagonist himself was a child. The horse is a symbol of childhood innocence, but its reappearance at the end of the film also indicates a lingering connection between father and daughter which has endured their time of estrangement (unlike the two wolves in Old Fangs, who ultimately decide they are beyond reconciliation). The cycle of resurgence and abandonment that characterised the protagonist's own journey has, in effect, been broken, for it appears that a character has purposely gone backwards in order to be reconciled with one left behind. We do not see how their future father-daughter relations play out, but in this unexpected act of clemency we find hope, for the first time, of a broken bond being renewed, and with it the possibility that spring may come again.

Old Fangs (2009)

Old Fangs from adrien merigeau on Vimeo.

Old Fangs is a short film directed by Adrien Meirgeau and Alan Holly and produced by Cartoon Saloon, the Irish animation company most famous for the feature films The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of The Sea (2015) and the children's TV series Skunk Fu!  It tells a story of estranged family relations and the challenges of confronting a past from which one has long since distanced oneself, using the anthropomorphic scenario of a young wolf venturing into the forest in order to reunite with the brutish father he fled from many years ago. 

The opening images of the film show a car traveling through a misty landscape; only after we see a nondescript finger fiddling with the radio controls is it revealed to us that the occupants are animals.  For the early stages of the film, Old Fangs plays as an increasingly perturbing mystery, the purpose of the characters' journey being divulged only very gradually as they press ever further onward.  We see this trio of animals - wolf, fox and Siamese cat individually - laughing together at a service station and might initially be inclined to assume that we are witnessing three friends embarking on a carefree road trip.  Our only hint, at this point, of any potential trouble waiting further down the road is in the uneasy stillness of the wolf character as his two companions are casually savouring the cool breeze blowing through an open car window.

As the surrounding scenery changes from open fields to houses and telephone wires to finally a dense wooded area, whereupon the characters leave their car and trek cautiously into the forest, there is a genuine sense of journeying into the dark unknown, the anxieties of the fox and cat aligning with those of the viewer.  Only when the wolf, upon reaching a pond concealed in the depths of the woodland, reflects that, "It hasn't changed at all...only it seems so much smaller," does it finally become apparent that he is returning to an old childhood haunt.  The characters continue their journey and, with night now having descended upon the forest, at long last happen upon what they have been searching for this whole time - a solitary house located within the forest clearing.  At this point, the fox and the cat retreat into the grasses and their lupine comrade is left to complete the last leg of his journey on his own.  The final piece of the puzzle (or the particular puzzle which opens the story, at any rate) clicks into place when the young wolf warily opens the door of the house, and greets the occupant with a tentative "Dad?"  There is now little remaining mystery as to the nature of the preceding journey; instead, it becomes a question of what past events have led to the estrangement between the old and young wolf and, more pressingly, what will happen next?

Right from his introduction, the older wolf has a foreboding presence that clearly distinguishes him from the trio of cautious travelers.  All four animals are anthropomorphised, yet he is given an obviously more bestial look, with his gargantuan form and lack of clothing.  In some respects, he resembles the archetypal "Big Bad Wolf" of fairy tale notoriety and yet in many shots he appears so monstrous and grotesque that he is scarcely recognisable as a wolf - our very first glimpse of the character shows a close-up of his snout exhaling cigarette smoke in a manner which gives him an almost draconic air.  Naturally, he completely dwarfs his son, to the extent that it is challenging to consider them as being of the same flesh and blood.  The older wolf embodies the wilder, more brutal lifestyle which his son has long-since deserted, a disconnect emphasised in the implication that the younger wolf has abandoned his carnivorous roots; upon the table are the remnants of a prey animal's entrails, which the older wolf picks up and angrily asks the younger wolf if it disgusts or frightens him.  He then imposes a test upon the younger wolf, commanding him to assume his image by sharing in his smoking habit.

Although some viewers deem the ending of the scenario to be incomplete or anti-climatic, to my mind it is perfectly done, as the fox and the cat, once again mirroring the anxieties of the viewer, express concern that the situation will turn ugly, only for the door of the house to open once again and for their friend to wander silently out, apparently without incident; as he rejoins them, he imparts simply that his father, "wasn't really pleased to see me", and they begin their journey back out of the forest.  It is an outcome that subverts viewer expectations, with the failed reunion between father and son ending not with heavy drama but with an understated disquietude, hinting at deeper and unspoken pains which simply cannot be brought to the surface.  It is only after the younger wolf has left the house that we see any hint of vulnerability from his father; his eyes are widened, as if he too is left shocked and hurt by the outcome.  It is in this wide-eyed expression that we finally see some resemblance between the father and son; it recalls the startled expression worn by the younger wolf as he first set eyes upon his father's house.

We also here get some inkling of the mother wolf's role in this equation, with a subtext about domestic abuse suggesting itself as smoke rises from the older wolf's cigarette and is seen to obscure her image in a family photograph.  She is scowling, as if staring accusingly back at him, perhaps betraying her dissatisfaction with the relationship.  As the younger wolf treks back through the forest and is haunted by a series of flashbacks recalling how, as a small cub, he would observe his father hunting, we see the mother wolf sitting silently upon the sidelines, her unhappiness muted and in the backdrop, but nevertheless evident.  Ultimately, we learn that it was the mother who led the younger wolf in the abandonment of his father (by which stage the gentle regard shown by the younger wolf toward a ladybird, in contrast to the ruthlessness with which his father hunts down and slaughters a deer, had illustrated how far apart they were already growing).  Overwhelmed by his memories, the younger wolf begins to run in the present too - for the second time in his life, he finds himself fleeing from the wilderness that he now knows for certain he can never be a part of.

One aspect of Old Fangs which stands out as particularly wonderful is its striking and extremely effective use of colour.  Throughout the film, the various stages of the younger wolf's journey is illustrated through dramatic changes in colouration which perfectly encapsulate the mood of each sequence.  As the trio of travelers head through the outskirts of the forest, the dominant colours are warm, glowing reds and browns, which gradually give way to darker hues as they get deeper into the forest and the last rays of evening sun begin to lesson.  As they approach the clearing and find themselves outside the house of the older wolf, this changes to a cold and ominous dark blue.  By stark contrast, the interior of the house is a glaring and unnaturally bright yellow, which further emphasises the imposing presence of the father wolf, and also the passionate, fiery tensions which lurk beneath the surface of their uneasy reunion.  Obviously, these changes in colour mark the temporal stages of the young wolf's journey, with day transforming into night, until finally he ends up in the artificially-lit milieu of his father's home.  But they also symbolise his emotional journey, and the increasingly harrowing turmoils of having to delve into his past and confront the source of those anxieties.  In the young wolf's initial childhood flashbacks, the dominant colour is green, with its obvious symbols of youth, freshness and springtime.  In later flashbacks, we see that autumn browns have crept into the picture and are becoming ever more prominent, indicating loss of innocence and the gradual decay of the young wolf's relationship with his father.

It's a tiny quirk of the film, but I do ponder the significance of the young wolf's companions being a fox and a cat, two fellow predatory animals, instead of two herbivorous species, as an obvious means of further signifying the young wolf's disconnect from his carnivorous origins.  Perhaps, alternatively, they indicate a disconnect from the dense wilderness in which the older wolf is most at home, with the cat suggesting domestication and the fox adaptability to more urbanised environs.  In that sense, they are signs of just how far the younger wolf has come in order to revisit his father, and how far away he initially fled to get away from him.  Moreover, they are indicators that, no matter how troubled or haunted the younger wolf might be by his past, he has friends and will never be alone in the world.  The same cannot be said for his father, who ends up condemned once again to his solitary lifestyle, having twice been deprived of the son whom he so desperately wanted to mold in his own image.

The final images of the film show the older wolf inside his house, huffing with anguish and shedding endless tears; a reminder of the pain that exists upon both sides of the broken relationship and a further hint of the terrible vulnerabilities lurking beneath his brutish exterior.  We sense that there is a far bigger story here to be explored, but Old Fangs wisely keeps things as understated as possible, giving us only bits and pieces and allowing the atmosphere of each individual scene to divulge as much or as little as we need.  It is a haunting conclusion to a beautiful and harrowing film, one which offers no easy answer to the issue of estrangement, taking us simply on a journey into a unsettling world where the traumas of past events continue to cast long and threatening shadows over the present, and the two wounded souls at the centre of the story are left to discover that they are beyond all reconciliation.