Oscar Nominations 2024: 8 of 11

And now for the remaining three animated features, with thoughts on two non-nominated animated features at the bottom:

Inside Out 2

1 nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Kelsey Mann

Cast: Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Kensington Tallman, Tony Hale, Lewis Black, Phyllis Smith, Ayo Edibiri, Liza Lapira, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Lane, Paul Walter Hauser 

Booooooo. I can't understand why we needed this film or why anyone liked it. Well, actually, no: I understand why people liked it, but I did not. This film repeats almost beat for beat the plot of the first Inside Out, and so I was, to put it mildly, completely bored. Worse yet, this movie purports to be about understanding teenagers, about exploring a teenager's emotional world, but it isn't about that. Instead, we don't follow the teenager at the center of the film or identify with her at all; we identify with a group of people trying to take care of that teenager, keep her out of trouble, make her happy, and turn her into a successful young person. In other words, the audience is asked to identify as her parents. The feelings that are supposedly the teenager's feelings are actually not hers at all; they're her parents'. I resent this bait and switch, and I am opposed to this movie; I think it's one of the worst of the year. 

Will win: N/A

Could win: Animated Feature

My rating: #95 out of 98

Vengeance Most Fowl

1 nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Merlin Crossingham, Nick Park

Cast: Ben Whitehead, Peter Kay, Lauren Patel, Reece Shearsmith

Wallace & Gromit encounter AI. This is charming and cute, and it has some excellent jokes. That Gromit is the most lovable, expressive pup! He speaks no words but his cute little face says it all. This is a long-awaited new Wallace and Gromit feature, and we should all be glad we have it. I think this captures the magic of the previous W&G shorts and features, and the AI touch really makes things interesting. I also gotta say: I love that villainous penguin. He's so terrible but also so funny. Sweet, patient, longsuffering Gromit is the best thing in this, though. He's the star of the movie, but he's also... Well, listen. He's the mother we never had, the sister everybody would want. He's the friend that everybody deserves. Frankly, I don't know a better person. This can't win the Oscar. It's a strong year for animated films this year. But this is a worthy entry in the canon.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #53 out of 98

Memoir of a Snail

1 nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Adam Elliot

Cast: Sarah Snook, Jacki Weaver, Eric Bana, Dominique Pinon, Saxon Wright

I liked how sex positive this was—it's easily the most sex-positive of the five animated features, and maybe the most sex-positive of all the Oscar nominees this year—but mostly I thought Memoir of a Snail was rather dreary. It is an occasionally funny film, but overall this is a very depressing memoir. I was disappointed that this took the fifth Animated Feature slot, even though I expected it. The thing is, there were two other really wonderful animated features this year that got zero end-of-year press, and both were better than Inside Out 2 and Memoir of a Snail. Please go watch Mars Express and Chicken for Linda! The first is visually stunning with exquisite worldbuilding; Mars Express is a very smart movie about AI. It’s the kind of intelligent, generous, and humane exploration of AI that we need. But this movie is also a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants action–crime thriller that kept me guessing and surprised me constantly. It's great stuff; easily the second-best animated film of the year. The other movie I need to recommend is Chicken for Linda! This is absolutely beautiful while also very funny. It’s a madcap farce about dealing with death. And it’s a children’s movie that is actually from the perspective of the kids!—unlike so many US American animated films that purport to be about kids.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #79 out of 98

More 2024 posts:

1. Emilia Pérez, The Brutalist, Wicked

2. A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Anora

3. The Substance, Dune: Part Two, Nosferatu

4. I'm Still Here, Sing Sing, The Wild Robot

5. Nickel Boys, The Apprentice, A Real Pain

6. Flow, September 5, Maria

7. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, The Girl with the Needle, Gladiator II

9. Animated Short Films

10. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Alien: Romulus, Better Man

11. A Different Man, Elton John: Never Too Late, The Six Triple Eight

Inside Out 2 (2024)

Miss Joy did not learn her lesson in the first film. So we need another movie to teach us all the same things. 

Inside Out 2 has three or four good jokes and a really funny reference to that famous 1984 Apple commercial, but this movie is really stupid. I was bored for most of it. 

Why must Pixar movies all be about forcing the child to explain herself, with making sense of the darkness within all children? In fact, Pixar now makes movies where they intensely project their feelings onto the kids in their films. I imagine these Pixar folks as really, really anxious parents, intensely worried about what’s going on inside their kids’ heads. They made a film about a teenager having anxiety, but of course teenagers didn’t make Inside Out 2. This is actually a film about parents’ anxiety about what their kids aren’t telling them. 

The clue to this is that we're supposed to identify with a rainbow of characters who are trying to take care of the teenager at the center of the film rather than the teenager herself, whose actions we consistently judge. And then the big lesson that Anxiety and Joy and the other emotions need to learn is that they have no control over who the teenager will grow up to be. At whom might such a lesson be directed? Right: parents.

The filmmakers show their hand at the end of the movie when we find that "This film is dedicated to our kids. We love you just the way you are."

If my impatience with all of this is exasperatingly obvious, it's because one of the arguments I make in my book Love Is Love Is Love is that animated films seem these days to be overwhelmingly about adults' frustrations with their children's inscrutability. I put it this way in my book:

Frozen and its sequels, in this sense, take part in a larger (adult) discourse within contemporary animated films – about children whose choices cannot be explained, who "act out," whose behavior is antisocial or mysterious or queer. Films such as Song of the Sea (2014), When Marnie Was There (2014), Inside Out (2015), My Life as a Courgette (2016), Your Name (2016), The Boss Baby (2017), Bao (2018), Over the Moon (2020), Soul (2020), Wolfwalkers (2020), Belle (2021), Poupelle of Chimney Town (2021), Luca (2021), Encanto (2021), and The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021) represent the child as frustratingly obtuse and distant, its desires inscrutable, its thought processes impossible (for the adult) to access. These are, in other words, all films about the queer child, the child who resists growing up according to the approved path laid out by adults or, as [Kathryn Bond] Stockton puts it, the child who grows sideways. Unlike many of these films, Frozen appears to celebrate the idea of Elsa leaning into this sideways growth, even if the film’s narrative still insists that she illuminate – "show herself" – so that her darkness no longer remains a mystery. 

And if this makes you think that I'm calling Riley, the teenager in Inside Out 2, a proto-lesbian that is because of course I am. But, unlike the parents who made this movie, I see no reason to be so anxious about it.