The 2018 Animation Contenders: On Happiness Road

Each weekend, Tim has been taking a look at one of the films submitted for the Best Animated Feature Oscar.

Taiwan's animation industry does not have a particularly strong reputation, to put it gently. For many years, the country's animation studios have largely served as inexpensive places to farm out work from other, more well-heeled companies, or to produce short films and clips that are largely ephemeral and quickly forgotten. So perhaps the first impressive thing about On Happiness Road is that it exists at all: a Taiwanese-produced feature-length animated film, about Taiwanese history and the cultural position of Taiwan in the wide world. That it is largely good is even more impressive.

The film is the brainchild of writer-director Sung Hsin-Yin, making her first feature after a handful of short films. It tells the life story of Chi (voiced by Kwei Lun-Mi) a thirtysomething expatriate who returns from America to Taipei, where we immediately intuit she'd rather not be... 

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The 2018 Animation Contenders: Two films by Masaaki Yuasa

Each Saturday, Tim has been taking a look at one of the films submitted for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Today, two of them by the same artist.

Masaaki Yuasa is, to my mind, the most interesting director working in animation today. Ever since his first feature, 2004's Mind Game, he has subjected himself to a nearly constant process of self-reinvention, with every one of his major projects shifting to a new style, genre, or most likely both. He's mostly worked in television, but he had a very phenomenal 2017 with two extremely well-received features. Both of those were released in the United States in 2018 by distributor GKIDS, and both are among the most stunning, even radical pieces of animation available on any screen of any size in the past twelve months.

The first one produced, though the second one released by GKIDS, The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl is also the more openly startling in pretty much every way. Stylistically and thematically, the film is a successor to Yuasa's 2010 television series The Tatami Galaxy, but this is no mere retread. It's a story of two nameless college students in Kyoto: an anxious boy who has a crush on a girl just starting to find her footing in the adult world. The film tells their stories using highly expressionistic animation, in which everything about the whole world bends itself around their subjective experiences of one incredible night that seems to stretch on for months...

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The 2018 Animation Contenders: MFKZ

Every Saturday this month, Tim will be taking a look at one of the films submitted for the Best Animated Feature Oscar.

For lack of a better place to start, it must surely be the case that MFKZ is the most globally-minded animated film released in the United States in 2018. The screenplay was adapted by French writer Guillaume "Run" Renaud, from his own 2015 comic book. The animation was done by Japanese company Studio 4°C, under the co-direction of Renaud and Shojiro Nishimi. The setting is saturated in a pop culture vision of Los Angeles that feels influenced more by the Grand Theft Auto video game series, the Fast & Furious movie series, and rap videos than the actual life of the city's black and Latino communities, and the story is a criticism of systemic racism in the U.S. and the worldwide corporate greed that has led to the impending climate crisis. Plus it's a crypto-remake of John Carpenter's They Live.

All of which is to say that the movie sure is… something. Something that is, frankly, quite a bit messy and confusing, possibly racist, and also exciting and startling in its originality.

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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Reviewed

Every Saturday this month, Tim will be taking a look at one of the films submitted for the Best Animated Feature Oscar.

Fans of Marvel's iconic hero Spider-Man have had a packed 2018, between Tom Holland's third big-screen turn as the character in Avengers: Infinity War and Tom Hardy's role as the antihero Eddie Brock in the conspicuously Spider-Man-less Venom. But the best has very much been saved for last, in the form of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, a new animated feature that's easily the best Spider-Man movie since Spider-Man 2 (2004) back in the distant early days of the modern superhero movie boom.

The film is the first big-screen adventure of Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), who first appeared in comic books in 2011 as a new Spider-Man following the temporary death of Peter Parker. He's a Brooklyn teenager, awkwardly fitting into life at an elite boarding school, living in perpetual chagrin at the overbearing authority of his cop dad (Brian Tyree Henry), and expressing himself through graffiti art (one of the things his dad is specifically overbearing about). And if that was all he ever was or did, Into the Spider-Verse would still put up a good argument for itself as a more than worthy movie...

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The 2018 Animation Contenders: Tito and the Birds

Every Saturday this month, Tim will be taking a look at one of the films submitted for the Best Animated Feature Oscar.

First things first: the Brazilian Tito and the Birds, a newly-minted Annie Award nominee for best animated independent feature, is a preposterously beautiful motion picture. The film's style is perhaps best described as looking like a digital oil painting, with swirling smears of color defining every background and character. It is not by any stretch of the imagination looking to present a realistic vision of the world, creating spaces defined only in outlines and crude shapes, and then filled in with dramatic swatches of barely-motivated reds and yellows and blues that function expressively and emotionally rather than to build out the narrative. It is, at an absolute minimum, one of the most eccentric, distinctive animated features released in 2018, but it's not just eccentric: the aesthetic is thoughtful, consistent, and pairs elegantly with the film's thematic concerns.

As for those thematic concerns, they're pretty overt, to the point that it almost feels like the film is a bit of a diatribe. Tito fashions itself as something of a Young Person's Guide to Media Skepticism...

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