93rd Academy Awards: On the Best Animated Feature nominees
Tuesday, March 16, 2021 at 9:36AM by Tim Brayton
With a day between us and the Oscar nominations announcement, it’s time to start digging into some of the categories that fly under the radar a little bit without the proper love and attention. For now, I’d like to walk you through the five films nominated for Best Animated Feature, ranked in order of how good I think their chances are of winning the big prize...
Soul (directed by Pete Docter, co-directed by Kemp Powers, animated by Pixar Animation Studios)
The most celebrated animated film of the year by a long shot, not least because it’s a strong return to form from a company that has been fighting to receive the kind of accolades it used to get every year during the 2000s. Rightfully winning comparisons to Docter’s last film and Pixar’s reigning masterpiece of the last decade, 2015’s Inside Out, Soul mixes eye-melting photorealism and extraordinary experiments with lines and shapes and diffuse color to create a film about the afterlife and the world of the living as two remarkable, and remarkably different environments. I’ll admit to not being entirely taken with the story taking place in those environments: it’s a little too loose for its own good, containing very little in the way of conflict or dramatic stakes – a remarkable problem for a film literally about life and death – and it’s sometimes indecisive about which character to follow. It’s awfully easy to get in front of the plot; Pixar’s formula is in full effect here, even if this is a remarkably well-executed version of the formula.
But let’s not grumble about what is, by any stretch of the imagination, a remarkable achievement of the animation medium (those squiggly line-drawing characters flexing about in three-dimensional space!) and of testing the limits of how abstract and philosophical you can make a children’s movie. It’s certainly a high-water mark for the current generation of Pixar films, every frame is gorgeous, the Oscar-nominated score is a triumphant blend of moods, and it’s frequently hilarious. When it all but inevitably takes the statue on April 25th, even if it wouldn’t get my personal vote (see the next entry), there will be no arguing that the Academy screwed this one up.
Wolfwalkers (directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart, animated by Cartoon Saloon)
When the film was brand new on Apple TV+, Cláudio did a great job of breaking down the characteristic style of the great Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, and how Wolfwalkers exemplified everything that’s loveliest about what is, to my tastes, the most consistently reliable animation house working right now. So mostly I just want to co-sign everything he said then: this really is the culmination of everything Cartoon Saloon has been working on since they were a surprising Oscar nominee for The Secret of Kells eleven years ago. Wolfwalkers is a commanding work of art that refines everything the studio has been up to till this point, creating a sometimes genuinely shocking challenge to our normal expectations of depth and movement in animation. The use of strong, clean lines to define the world of an English town in contrast to the free-flowing, scratchy pencil sketches that evoke the Irish wilderness are an entire thematic in and of themselves, and the film’s gorgeous color design makes the woods seem vividly alive even as they’re graphic abstractions.
As far as winning the Oscar, all I can say is that I’ll be rooting for it, but I also won’t get too broken-hearted if and when it doesn’t come through. Still, this is the only animated film not titled Soul to receive any meaningful amount of awards attention this season, so we can’t count it all the way out. At the very least, if any of the voters have a case of Pixar fatigue, this is the obvious beneficiary. Still, it would take an awfully strong push from a distributor with no experience to make this happen.
Onward (directed by Dan Scanlon, animated by Pixar Animation Studios)
Pragmatically, while in principle I can't say that none of the remaining three nominees have a chance of winning, it seems awfully hard to see the path to victory for any of them. Consider, if you will, the other Pixar film of the year (released on the last weekend before before theaters started closing en masse at the start of the pandemic, quickly moving to Disney+). It’s just awfully hard to imagine why someone, weighing this and Soul, would decide to vote for this one. It was greeted with a critical reception best summed up as, “well that sure was a movie,” and while its soft box office was surely heavily affected by COVID-19, it wasn’t looking to set any kind of blockbuster records even before that.
I’m not going to tell you that any of this is unjustified. Onward is a pretty uninspiring film, honestly, especially with Soul sitting right there. Its creation of a fantasy world in which Dungeons & Dragons-style creatures live in a purposefully bland suburb that feels drawn from the 1970s and 1980s feels a bit more labored than the best of Pixar’s world-building, and the story of two elf brothers trying to use a magic spell to talk to their dead father doesn’t have nearly the emotional resonance that it should. Still, there’s some charming low-key comedy, and Pixar isn’t going to turn out anything that’s not very pleasant to look at. It’s a good family-friendly adventure, with an unexpectedly successful emotional punch at the very end, and while I doubt that would be enough to swing a nomination in a normal year, it’s an easy enough film to like.
A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (directed by Richard Phelan and Will Becher, animated by Aardman Animations)
A film that I had genuinely forgotten came out during the eligibility period to nomination morning (it was released on Netflix in the U.S. all the way back in January 2020), though not because it isn’t lovely This follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Shaun the Sheep Movie from 2015 doesn’t really move the needle in any direction from its predecessor’s quality, either in its storytelling or its animation. But it doesn’t need to. Aardman’s characteristic style has always favored gentle humor and playfully silly stories, anchored in lovingly hand-crafted stop-motion animation and the Shaun the Sheep film and television franchise is probably the gentlest thing they’ve ever done: wordless pantomime in which Shaun and his fellow sheep get into minor scrapes and endanger, then save, a small farm in an especially cozy corner of the English countryside. Farmageddon looks to upgrade the stakes a bit with a science-fiction story involving a characteristically adorable bunny-shaped extraterrestrial, but it’s still the simplest, sweetest thing on this list. Not everything works perfectly – the jokes referencing sci-fi pop culture aren’t fresh (The X-Files, in 2020? Okay then), and they fit awkwardly with the storybook timelessness of the pantomime – but it’s all very cute and warm and surely the most watchable film nominated. Which can’t hurt it with voters, nor can having its highly distinctive aesthetic. Still, this is a tiny, unassuming movie, and “unassuming” doesn’t win Oscars.
Over the Moon (directed by Glen Keane, co-directed by John Kahrs, animated by Sony Pictures Imageworks for Pearl Studio and Netflix Animation)
Prior to its release, the big news was that animation icon Keane, whose Dear Basketball won Best Animated Short Film three years ago, was making his feature film debut as a director. Keane, whose work as one of the pillars of Disney animation stretching all the way back to his magnificent bear attack sequence in 1981’s The Fox and the Hound, is as close as it comes to a superstar in the world of animation, and his attempts over the years to combine computer and traditional animation forms is a laundry list of tantalizing “what if” possibilities.
Over the Moon is not, sadly, the transformative work of medium-redefining creativity we might have hoped for, and it surely was never going to be. A U.S.-China collaboration, the film represents an attempt by the American Netflix and the Chinese Pearl Studio to force their way into the international prominence enjoyed by the likes of Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks, and that means a script that’s pure boilerplate. Perhaps the only thing noteworthy about the writing is that it’s not sure if it wants to be a fairy tale musical like Disney made in the ‘90s or a sarcastic comedy like DreamWorks made in the ‘00s, and its efforts to split the difference are at least interestingly misguided.
Its failures as a story, though, are outweighed by its success as a work of animation. Keane and his team aren’t redefining what CG animation can do by any means, but they are being plenty creative, especially in their use of bright, highly saturated color to create a fantasy world of dazzling moon creatures, all of them glowing with an internal light that exaggerates how much they look like bright colorful shapes, rather than everyday animated characters. It’s easy to hope that Netflix and Pearl give Keane another shot, now that he’s proven that he can make a project successful enough to make it to the Academy Awards. But this project is a far cry from a new animated classic, and it will surely have to do with just a nomination that presumably reflects the animation branch’s respect for Keane the man more than their respect for this movie itself.
Reader Comments (7)
I was hoping Terra Willy would get in.
Should win: Wolfwalkers
Will win: Soul
Easiest category of the night.
I loved SOUL but color me shocked that if I was ranking these films, it would come in 3rd or 4th. WOLFWALKERS is the top animated film this year (no question) and frankly ONWARD is the better executed Pixar film IMO.
It should come down to both Soul and Wolfwalkers as I wouldn't mind either of those films to win the Oscar though Soul is more likely to win.
thanks you
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I watched Wolfwalkers and Soul this weekend, and loved both. I think Soul is the better movie... but I'd have a tough time voting against Wolfwalkers. Cartoon Saloon deserves and Oscar, and Wolfwalkers is their best work to date.
I'm not sure I agree with the rankings, but that's what lists are for right?
I agree that Soul will probably win because it appeals to a broader group of people in the Academy. Still, I strongly disagree that Onward is a lesser picture. The message about brotherhood and fatherhood were very strong and well-executed. It's a funny, sweet movie with a fantastically satisfying ending (more than Soul IMO). In a different year, I think it would be a winner.
As far as Over the Moon, I was happy to see it get nominated. I think it's definitely most appealing to children, but as a children's film, it's really one of the best one. Any Academy member with children will know that that's the movie that most resonates with children out of this list. I know in my houseful, it got watched more than a handful of times, compared to just one for the others (Onward maybe got 3 replays). It appealed to both genders too, which is one place where Onward perhaps is lacking. In any case, very few Academy members are children, so that doesn't really matter. It should be happy to be nominated.