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

2018 Animated Movie Roundup

I have been puzzling over which films might be nominated in the five slots for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars. Last year you might remember that voters scraped the absolute bottom of the barrel. So few good animated movies came out that the members of the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch unironically nominated The Boss Baby and Ferdinand as somehow equal in quality to Coco. Their hands were tied, though. According to the rules for this category, if a certain number of animated features is released in any given year, there will be five nominees. The threshold was reached in 2017, but the quality was not.

This year, however, we're in a different situation. Early in the year, Wes Anderson's gorgeous (if twee) Isle of Dogs came out, and in June Pixar/Disney released Incredibles 2 (which does have a really awesome sequence where a baby fights a racoon but which ends up being only just fine). And here we are in December and Spider-man: into the Spider-verse, Ralph Breaks the Internet, and Mirai are all in theatres.

There are even two additional contenders for this category, as far as I can tell. Those are Nick Park's Early Man and Milorad Krstić's Ruben Brandt, Collector (which I want to see whether it gets nominated or not).

* * *

Through a stroke of sheer luck I managed to see Hosoda Mamoru's Mirai. It's playing in select cities (this week it's Oakland, Tucson, Vancouver, and a few others), and as soon as I heard about the movie I googled it and it was playing in Tallahassee, where I live. It screened twice only in one weekend via Fathom Events, and I secured myself a ticket knowing nothing about the movie.

...And it is one of my favorite things I saw this year. Mirai is the story of little two-year-old Kun, whose parents bring home a baby sister. The little boy is inevitably jealous, as his parents divert some of their attention to the little girl and away from him. In the world of Mirai, however, Kun is visited by a few impossible guests, including his sister as a middle-schooler. (The title of the movie, Mirai, is the girl's name, but it also means the future. In Japanese the title is a pun: 未来のミライ – Mirai from the Future.)

This is a magical, deeply moving film. It starts off simple, with the smallest of problems, but it becomes a gorgeous meditation on family connections, what we pass down through our familial lines, the histories of our ancestry, and the importance of letting small things go in favor of big relationships. I fell in love with this film and I can't recommend it enough.

* * *

And then there's the sequel to Wreck-it-Ralph, Ralph Breaks the Internet. The original film came out in 2012, so I have to confess to forgetting whether I liked it or not. This is actually why I keep a blog in the first place, because I can never remember why (or sometimes even whether) I liked a movie or not. In any case, I saw Ralph Breaks the Internet and thought it was very, very stupid.

It's worth saying, I think, that one of the reasons I really disliked this movie is that I think Sarah Silverman's acting is very bad. John C. Reilly is great – he's always great – and he plays his big, dumb character with sincerity and sensitivity. But Silverman is doing this phony little kid voice that a) doesn't sound like a little kid at all and b) sounds like an adult's commentary on a little kid. It's as though the entire performance is a kind of tongue-in-cheek critique of how stupid little kids are. (And I don't think kids are stupid at all, so I don't understand why this movie thinks they are.)

What annoyed me about it so much is that Ralph Breaks the Internet thinks its audience is stupid. The jokes are all stupid, the "lessons" it has to "teach" are all stupid, and although it purports to be a movie about the internet, it has nothing interesting to say about the internet at all. It is simply filled with a bunch of things we already know about the internet. Its plot is all clichés and its sentiments are all hackneyed. I haven't seen a lot of movies I've hated in 2018, but this is easily the worst thing I've seen all year. It doesn't even try to be a good movie.

Ralph Breaks the Internet is a complete and total waste of time. (Oh, I finally looked to see whether or not I liked the original Wreck-it-Ralph. Turns out, I didn't. I ranked it 73 out of 87 in 2012. Right below The Hobbit: an Unexpected Journey.)

* * *

But why keep trashing Ralph Breaks the Internet when I could be talking about how fucking awesome Spider-man: into the Spider-verse is?

This. Movie. Is. So. Cool. There are numerous things to say about this, and I think the plot is inventive and fun, but Into the Spider-verse is, after all, a superhero movie, and so you already know the plot. An evil bad guy with lots of money or lots of spunk has invented some insane device in order to do something or other and destroy the world in the process. There is one small way to stop him, and stop him we must! Save the world! As you can probably surmise, the world does not get destroyed and the villain does not succeed. But this is just the plot, and if you've come to Into the Spider-verse for the plot, you're here for the wrong reasons.

The importance here is on the visuals, which are the coolest I've seen in maybe the last five years. This film is endlessly inventive, totally bizarre, and completely delightful. It has an awesome soundtrack, but mostly it just looks so cool. Into the Spider-verse replicates the look of a comic book in fascinating ways, as though you're inside a moving comic book. I saw it in 3D and I think that's an absolute must. The movie uses several comic book devices as it tells its story, and it continued to surprise me, throughout its entire length, including during its (very cool) end credits sequence.

I can't recommend this movie enough. I've put it at #3 for the year – above most of the year's "best" movies, including Roma, A Star Is Born, BlacKkKlansman, and Black Panther.