Animated Feature Contenders: "This Magnificent Cake!"

by Tim

With no more new animated releases coming up for a while, this round-up is changing focus: we'll spend the next few weeks looking at some of the more noteworthy titles eligible for the Best Animated Feature Oscar this year. And "feature" barely feels like the right word to describe the 44-minute This Magnificent Cake!, but it just makes it according to the Academy's rules (which state that a feature is more than 40 minutes long).

So it might make it to "feature" on a technicality, but it's unquestionably noteworthy. This is the longest collaboration to date from Belgian directors Emma De Swaef & Marc James Roels, who have made a cottage industry over the last decade with some of the most distinctive-looking films in the world. Not a claim to make lightly, but it's hard to come up with any other way of putting it. The duo's characteristic style is to fashion puppets out of wool and other craft material, and then give them life through stop-motion animation; it's basically what you'd get if you were told to make a movie using only the things you could find in a fabric store...

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