Andrew Stanton with the first of his Animated Feature OscarsTim here. This November, we’ve been reflecting on the films of 2003, in preparation for the newest edition of the Supporting Actress Smackdown, and I’d like to use this as the opportunity to return us all to a simpler time. An easier time. A saner time. A time when the Best Animated Feature category at the Academy Awards wasn’t routinely filled up with five nominees because some much-too-small arbitrary threshold had been reached.
There were three nominees in the category that year, out of a field of eleven. And even that was not quite a small enough number to keep away from something a bit like a filler nomination (looking at the list, the fact that Satoshi Kon could have two eligible titles in Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers, and swing a nomination for neither of them, depresses me something fierce). But it’s not a bad mix of films at all, anchored by two films that have survived the intervening decade as bona-fide classics of the medium, and one film that… hasn’t, though it’s clung to an appreciative cult.
Fish, Bear and Other after the jump
Far and away, the most apparently disposable of the three is Walt Disney Feature Animation’s Brother Bear, a movie that had the deeply unfortunate distinction of being the first movie released after the company announced that they’d be gutting their traditional animation program to focus on computer-animated films. This gave it, at the time, an unenviable and probably fatal status as the studio’s great farewell to the artform it had done so much to develop over the preceding 75 years.
And when that’s the baggage that you bring to the movie, boy, does it ever fail to live up to your expectations. Compared to a lot of what Disney was up to in the 2000s, Brother Bear really isn’t all that bad (hi, Chicken Little), and from a design standpoint, it’s among their best films of the decade. Using an aspect ratio shift and a suddenly brightened color palette to visually dramatize the hero’s transformation from human to bear is one of the most concise and efficient gestures in any Disney film of that generation. And the animals are all pretty fantastic examples of adding just enough human detail to a character design to make them relatable, without tipping into anthropomorphism.
That being said, the script, with its frequent, clumsy attempts to mimic The Lion King, is dispiriting and somewhat aimless, and the characters are bland Disney clichés. It’s thin filmmaking even if it’s better than you remember (or more likely, do not remember), but it’s everybody’s third favorite of the nominees for a reason.
Personally, I love Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville best of the 2003 vintage, and indeed of all animated features from the 2000s. The deadpan pantomime, grotesque caricatures, and random tangents in the plot are different from just about anything else out there, but it’s not just different for the sake of it. It’s too aesthetically unified for that to be the case.
I have absolutely no room to talk about the film aging well, given that I watch it almost every year, but time and familiarity have not dulled the charming weirdness of it. The film plays by a very unique rulebook, telling a story whose dramatic stakes are always a little bit fuzzy and exploring a world that doesn’t make any sense, but Chomet makes it all work. What should be oppressively strange has instead a warm, handmade quality, and there’s too much personality to write it off as random weirdness. It’s one of the undeniable treasures of contemporary animation, and “Belleville Rendez-vous” was out-and-out robbed for the Best Song Oscar that year.
But, of course, the big dog in that year’s race was the ultimate winner, Finding Nemo. I assume I don’t need to say more – the most financially successful film Pixar released prior to Toy Story 3, and plenty of folks’ pick for the studio’s best movie ever. It’s not mine, but I can readily understand how it would engender that kind of enthusiasm. There’s the scope of the film, for one thing: a movie that takes place in an apparently boundless ocean (beautifully realized by the animators) wins plenty of points for sheer ambition. It’s also one of the best early example of Pixar’s skill for casting unexpected but terrifically well-chosen actors for its vocal cast: Ellen DeGeneres is rightly beloved for playing the addled blue tang Dory, but Albert Brooks’s neurotic clownfish Marlin is an even weirder choice for a kids’ film, and every bit as successful.
And that, in fact, is one of the secrets about Finding Nemo: it’s not necessarily as much of a “kids’ film” as it seems. This was the first movie where Pixar started making films of significantly more maturity and thematic complexity than anyone expected from American cartoons: themes about the difficulties of being a single parent, even now, seems like they should be completely off-limits for a movie about talking fish. And that, more than anything, I think is what made the film seem like such a watershed moment: it changed the rules about what animation could talk about, at least for a while (I’m not holding my breath for Finding Dory to reach quite the same level of sophistication). That’s on top of being one of the most gorgeous movies, animated or otherwise, of the 2000s.
It was Pixar’s first Animated Feature Oscar, and one of the most well-deserved they ever won. But let me open it up to all of you: what’s everyone else’s favorite movie of the 2003 Animated Film race? Any other worthy titles that you wish had managed a nomination?