Oscar Predictions, 1st Round: Best Animated Feature

by Nathaniel R

It's time to begin the annual April Foolish Predictions debacle. We say debacle and we call them "Foolish" not just as a pun on April Fools (even though yes, the bulk of these will be in May - shut up!) but because we know so little about the year's contenders this early in the year. After the jump the list of animated pictures that might be in play and the possibility that the two female breakouts from 2021's West Side Story may go head-to-head in this category as musical protagonists... 

THE CHART IF YOU WANNA SEE IT. BUT HERE IS MORE INFO...

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Links

• The Playlist Tenet pushed back to August. Shouldn't they just push it back to November at this point? What will change in one month's time?
• Variety Zoe Kravitz talks playing Catwoman in The Batman (2021). La Pfeiffer gave her blessing!
• Awards Daily interviews Tim Blake Nelson of Watchmen

After the jump a new Princess Diana movie, Big Mouth changes, new roles for Keke Palmer and Michael Keaton and a Gone With the Wind discussion...

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Puzzling it out with Dreamworks

by Nathaniel R

During quarantine my roommate and I spent hours doing this 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle from Dreamworks. Part of some swag box for their anniversary I believe...

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Chicken Run for the Despondent Soul

by Daniel Crooke

In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday, it’s been a challenge not to hide under the covers and never come out. When fundamental civil liberties, minority rights, and the safety of the entire planet are on the line, the diverting promises of everyday distractions are a mixed bag; the stakes are high, the situation is dire, and change depends on every single American who believes in justice for all to keep their eyes open and their voices loud on the task at hand. Action demands itself. Everything else can feel a bit frivolous right now.

But for those who need a quick bit of movie fantasy with a hearty, hopeful dose of relevance, I would recommend clicking over to Netflix like I did last night to refamiliarize yourself with the crackling Aardman claymation caper Chicken Run - a story about a henhouse uprising of economically disadvantaged chickens taking their rights back from the human farmers who mean to exterminate them in the name of wealth concentration and boundless brand recognition.

Concerned fundamentally with the importance of political organization as a means of toppling inhumane powers that threaten freedom and liberty, Chicken Run is a model for the promises of civic engagement. The film's clucking characters escape the despair-cast shackles of its dead end world by tirelessly fighting the good fight against odds impossibly stacked against them. Their fearless leader Ginger carries the torch for the film’s fowl feminism, outsmarting the bloviating, dimwitted, and fraudulent men on the farm to shine a path through the darkness for her disenfranchised comrades. Indeed, it is only when the night falls into its pitchest black that Ginger and her team of nasty women band together with enough grit and goodwill to extinguish their enemy once and for all and seize their brighter tomorrow. Food for thought.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Chicken Run"

With Shaun the Sheep currenty struggling at the box office, it's an ideal time to give a round of thanks to Aardman animation for all their wonderfully specific aesthetic and the painstaking stop motion or stop-motion-like CGI shorts and features they've made over the years. This week's Hit Me With Your Best Shot travels back to 2000, the year before Oscar added a Best Animated Feature category, to the film that surely would have won it had they started just a year earlier: Chicken Run.

This delightfully British comedy is about a tenacious 'hard boiled' leader Ginger who wants to rescue her fellow hens from their egg-making enslavery at the farm before they become roasts. Mrs Tweedy (perfectly voiced by Miranda Richardson), tired of the farm's low profits, decides to make them pies instead. Cue slapstick action, a sly morbidity, repetitive but highly effective sight gags and lots of jokes about prisoner of war films, organized labor, groupthink, and, you know, chickens.

Here are the Best Shots chosen by our informal club. Click on any of the images to read the accompanying article. My choice is at the end of the post.

CHICKEN RUN (2000)
8 shots chosen by 10 participating blogs 

I’m impressed with their smart set and costume designs that imitate the war time, including concentration camp (the chicken farm), clothing and even the gas chamber (the pie machine)...
-Chirapat

My favorite moments are the slightly darker and somber ones that really give this film its depth...
-Sorta That Guy

I always say when I judge a comedy the number one factor is- Did it make me laugh?  The answer for Chicken Run is Yes!  I laughed back in 2000 and I laughed today watching it. 
-54 Disney Reviews 

 There's a great mastery of visual grammar at work here, and directors Park and Peter Lord show a strong hand in their feature debuts.
-The Entertainment Junkie

The mixture of round, soft and mostly appealing character designs with its detailed and bleak world is jarring at first, but the mixture of the two give the film quite a striking look...." 
-Magnificent Obsession, um blog de cinema 

A very traditional movie in terms of plot mechanics, but it becomes something much more sentimental and endearing by telling this story from the perspective of a group of claymation chickens..." 
-Coco Hits NY 

The shot above is one of the many great sight gags in the film..."
-Film Actually 

More like people than the absolute dread of the Tweedies in their midst, the chickens quite quickly caught me off-guard with their stock yet recognizable personalities...
-Movie Motorbreath

The content and framing of this shot being rather conventional, save for the chickenification of it. Which is no sin, of course..."
- Antagony & Ecstasy

As for my shot...

This is not it, but I have to share it because it was my heartiest laugh in 2015 (and I didn't remember it at all from 2000). A throwaway reaction shot during Ginger's planning meeting...

Now, i know our last escape attempt was a bit of a fiasco… 

The "acting" in this super brief cutaway is nothing less than perfection.

I normally select my shot before I've seen any from the contributors but I was late this week and of all the images I saved, two of the three I was struggling to choose between were Babs with her knitted noose, a great morbid sight gag, and that beautifully eery overhead shot in the oven, which is so bold design wise and unlike much else in the movie. Amusingly they happen to be the two shots that were both chosen more than once! Or perhaps it's telling considering that the film relies heavily on highly conventional, even cliché, shot types -- see Tim's article for a good description of why this is. 

The best shot in Chicken Run is not a single shot but the repeated motif of entire groups of chickens staring directly at the camera, blinking round eyes, dimbulb groupthink, and unified emotions, whether its awe, hope, or hysteria. But it's so much funnier in motion, so here is my choice.

Also funnier in motion, as the farmer does a double take with his flashlight, and the real chicken, hiding under the bed making awkward chicken noises. It's a great meta joke about this entire movie; a movie painstakingly crafted by humans with anthropomorphic clay chickens as their stand-ins, with the chickens themselves play-acting animal behavior for "humans" inside of it, with their own crafted objects. It's smart but, even better, it's sublimely silly.

NEXT WEEK: ANGELS IN AMERICA (2003) - Here are the details