Oscar Nominations 2019: Part 8 of 11

Part 1: Roma, The Favourite, Vice, A Star Is Born.
Part 2: Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Green Book, Bohemian Rhapsody.
Part 3: Mary Poppins Returns, First Man, Cold War.
Part 4: Can You Ever Forgive Me?, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Part 5: Never Look Away, Mary Queen of Scots, Isle of Dogs, The Wife.
Part 6: Detainment, Marguerite, Skin, Madre, Fauve.
Part 7: At Eternity's Gate, First Reformed, Shoplifters, Capernaum.
Part 8:

Spider-man: into the Spider-verse

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

Cast: Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, Brian Tyree Henry, Luna Lauren Velez, Zoë Kravitz, Lily Tomlin, Kathryn Hahn, Liev Schreiber, Chris Pine, Nicolas Cage, John Mulaney, Kimiko Glenn

I loved this film so much. I wasn't expecting even to like it – an animated Spider-man film? Don't we get enough Marvel on our screens these days? – but Into the Spider-verse is no ordinary Marvel movie. It's a moving comic-book with clear references to the style of comic books themselves and an ability to use that style to generate quality humor. Spider-verse has fresh, funny jokes and an irreverent approach to the save-the-world obsessions of these types of films. This is a great movie. It's in my top 5 for the year.
Will Win: Animated Feature
Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #4 out of 68

Incredibles 2

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Brad Bird

Cast: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Catherine Keener, Bob Odenkirk, Samuel L. Jackson, Huck Milner, Eli Fucile, Brad Bird, Sophia Bush, Phil LaMarr, Isabella Rossellini

Eh. This is totally forgettable. I think because it's basically a re-tread of The Incredibles. There are a couple of really great sequences – one with the little baby and a racoon that is cute and a great montage in which Mr. Incredible begins to succeed at being a stay-at-home dad – but... this is just not very inventive. The big plot-twists (and Incredibles 2 is for some reason invested in plot-twists) is obvious from the very beginning of the movie, and the action sequences aren't nearly as fun as they ought to be. This is harmless, but definitely a let-down of a sequel.
Will Win: N/A
Could Win: Animated Feature
My Rating: #35 out of 67

Mirai (未来のミライ)

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Hosoda Mamoru

Cast: John Cho, Rebecca Hall, Jaden Waldman, Victoria Grace, Crispin Freeman, Stephanie Sheh, Daniel Dae Kim, Yakusho Kōji

This movie is perfection. If Spider-verse weren't as great as it was this would easily be my favorite animated movie of the year. As it is, it is in my top ten for this year. It is worth saying, too, that I tend to be biased against animated features. I consistently resist ranking them really high for some reason, but this year, we have Mirai and Spider-verse and I am in love. This is a gorgeously drawn and beautifully made film about family and history and learning new ways of being in the world. I know it's tough for most people to see right now – I got really lucky and was able to see a screening – but as soon as it is on DVD you're all going to see it and love it. I promise.

Will Win: N/A
Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #6 out of 68

Ralph Breaks the Internet

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Phil Johnston, Rich Moore

Cast: John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Gal Gadot, Taraji P. Henson, Jack McBrayer, Jane Lynch, Alan Tudyk, Alfred Molina, Ed O'Neill, Sean Giambrone, Flula Borg, Timothy Simons, Ali Wong, Hamish Blake

Honestly I don't understand why stuff like this exists. Why people give things like this awards is even more unfathomable to me. This film is not funny at all, and it seems entirely designed not to make its audience laugh but to make us nod our heads in knowledgeable ways about how the world works. But who is this even for? In this film, Ralph, if you don't know, goes into a materialized version of the internet. Unbelievably, this image of the internet is not the least bit visually interesting. It's like these filmmakers didn't even try. There is more to say about Sarah Silverman's saccharine performance, about the stupid emotional lessons about friendship and betrayal that this film thinks it's "teaching" us, and about the ridiculous plot. But this is a phoned-in sequel that isn't worth anyone's time. Ralph is at the absolute bottom of my list.
Will Win: N/A
Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #68 out of 68

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.

Oscar Noms 2017: 12 of 13

Part 1 - La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival
Part 2 - Manchester by the Sea, Hacksaw Ridge, Lion
Part 3 - Fences, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, Jackie
Part 4 - Florence Foster Jenkins, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Passengers, Rogue One
Part 5 - Deepwater Horizon, Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, A Man Called Ove
Part 6 - Captain Fantastic, Elle, Loving, Nocturnal Animals
Part 7 - The Lobster, 20th Century Women, Silence, Hail, Caesar!
Part 8 - Live-action Short Films
Part 9 - Animated Short Films
Part 10 - Toni Erdmann, The Salesman, Land of Mine, Tanna
Part 11 - Allied, The Jungle Book, Doctor Strange, 13 Hours

Part 12:

Sully

1 Nomination

• Sound Editing

Director: Clint Eastwood

Cast: Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Valerie Mahaffey, Jamey Sheridan, Mike O'Malley, Laura Linney, Holt McCallany, Anna Gunn, Delphi Harrington, Ahmed Lucan

I hated this film. But mostly it was just because this was a bad film. It is, apparently, based on a true story. A pilot loses both of his engines soon after taking off from a New York airport. He decides that he can't get back to JFK, La Guardia or Teterboro, so he will land the plane in the Hudson. He does this. But then people start questioning things: should he have landed in the Hudson? Why didn't he go back to one of the airports? Had the plane really lost both of its engines? Was the pilot drunk? Showing off? Proud? This movie shows the crash at least four times. Five? I can't remember. I have already tried to block it out. This is also the whitest movie of the year (and that includes A Man Called Ove, which takes place in Sweden). There are moments where the camera just looks over a sea of white faces. Sully is supposed to be about New Yorkers working together and uniting to solve a problem as a kind of team. But what it is really about is this older white man doing the right thing and then an insurance company (because of cynical greed) accusing him of not doing the right thing. In other words – and I don't think this is a stretch – Sully is a giant metaphor in which the old white guy knows how to take care of the people, but then instead of thanking him everyone complains and the old white guy (he's a hero after all!) could lose everything. Except that Eastwood's own metaphor doesn't work, even in the movie he directed: it's big business that is trying to crush the old white man's dreams, not other people. I disliked the politics of this movie, obviously, but more importantly I disliked the filmmaking. This movie replays the same thing over and over. There just wasn't enough plot in this tale for a full-length film.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #91 out of 95

Zootopia

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Byron Howard, Rich Moore

Cast: Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman, Idris Elba, Jenny Slate, Nate Torrence, Bonnie Hunt, Don Lake, Tommy Chong, J.K. Simmons, Octavia Spencer, Alan Tudyk, Shakira

This felt generic. Why does everyone like this so much? I mean, I get it: Biological justifications for racist behavior are bad. None of us has anything hard-wired into our systems. You get no argument from me there, but, like... you got anything else? I knew that already. In fairness to this film, it is designed as an allegory to teach children not to judge the kids they meet by the color of their skin, not to make snap judgments about people because of their weight, their size, their facial features, their skin color, etc. But here's the thing: is this really a problem that children have? Seems to me it's more of an issue for adults. I'm pretty sure this is still going to win when they hand out the award, though. 

Will Win: Animated Feature

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #67 out of 95

La Tortue Rouge (The Red Turtle)

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Michael Dudok de Wit

This film is perfect – just perfect. It is a film without dialogue, but it tells a beautiful, fantastic story. A man is stranded on a deserted island, and he is prevented from escaping the island by a very large, red turtle. The turtle is plainly enchanted in some way, and in fact the entire film functions as a kind of dream, in which the man cannot be sure whether or not what he is seeing is real. The entire thing is gorgeous. It is worth noting, too, that Michael Dudok de Wit is the first non-Japanese director to make a film for Studio Ghibli. They chose beautifully. I adored this film. It is one of my favorite films of the whole year. (And it is in theatres now, so go catch it on the big screen.)

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #10 out of 95

Ma Vie de Courgette (My Life as a Zucchini)

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Claude Barras

Cast: Gaspard Schlatter, Sixtine Murat, Paulin Jaccoud, Michel Vuillermoz, Raul Ribera, Estelle Hennard, Elliot Sanchez, Lou Wick, Brigitte Rosset


This film is the only film I will not be able to see before the Academy Awards. It is a stop-motion animation movie about a little orphan named Courgette (Zucchini). It is a fairly short film (66 minutes) and it is worth noting that it was also chosen as Switzerland's offical selection for Foreign Language Picture – and that it made the 9-movie shortlist. So it was almost nominated in that category, as well.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Not Yet Ranked

Back to:
Part 1 - La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival
Part 2 - Manchester by the Sea, Hacksaw Ridge, Lion
Part 3 - Fences, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, Jackie
Part 4 - Florence Foster Jenkins, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Passengers, Rogue One
Part 5 - Deepwater Horizon, Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, A Man Called Ove
Part 6 - Captain Fantastic, Elle, Loving, Nocturnal Animals
Part 7 - The Lobster, 20th Century Women, Silence, Hail, Caesar!
Part 8 - Live-action Short Films
Part 9 - Animated Short Films 

Part 10 - Toni Erdmann, The Salesman, Land of Mine, Tanna
Part 11 - Allied, The Jungle Book, Doctor Strange, 13 Hours

Oscar Nominees 2013: Part 8 of 13

Wreck-it Ralph

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Rich Moore

Cast: John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Jane Lynch, Jack McBrayer, Alan Tudyk, Ed O'Neill, Dennis Haysbert

Everyone seems to love Wreck-it Ralph except for me. What's happening? It's odd to me that this film is even nominated in this category when the far superior and much funnier Rise of the Guardians was left off the Animated Feature list this year. Ralph is the story of a video-game bad-guy who wants to be friends with all of the heroes of the video game after work-hours. Trouble ensues. He befriends a young glitch in a different video game and from there the plot becomes your standard dumb-older-man-meets-young-spunky-girl narrative where the guy learns all sorts of things (mostly "how to open his heart") from the young girl. The young girl herself, incidentally – and this is always how it goes – doesn't need to learn anything, but her pure, innocent, childlike affection manages to work its way past his crusty exterior. Zzzzz. This was all done so much better in 2001 in 2D (and this year in 3D) by a film called Monsters, Inc. In any case, Wreck-it Ralph feels like a re-tread to me. Retro video-game references spice it up a little bit, and Beard Papa has a cameo, but mostly I was bored.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Animated Feature

My Rating: #53 out of 63

ParaNorman

1 Nomination

• Best Original Screenplay

Director: Chris Butler & Sam Fell

Cast: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Tucker Albrizzi, Anna Kendrick, Casey Affleck, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Leslie Mann, Elaine Stritch, Jeff Garlin, Tempestt Bledsoe, John Goodman

ParaNorman is really similar to Tim Burton's Frankenweenie. Both titles feature puns. Both films are about kids fighting Halloween monsters. Both are about kids who are "different" from the rest of the kids around them. ParaNorman was released in August and Frankenweenie had an October release, but Burton's film appears to be the favorite among voters. Frank(enweenie)ly I preferred this zombie comedy by Chris Butler and Sam Fell, though both films are pretty great. ParaNorman is about a young man who sees ghosts. He is a weird kid – and is subject to all sorts of bullying at school and at home – because he talks to the dead people in his life, communicates with dead dogs, and gets accosted by his strange, shifty, snaggle-toothed uncle. Then zombies attack the town and Norman has to come to the rescue to communicate with the undead and figure out how to solve his town's zombie problem. It isn't just that the weird, bullied kid turns out to be the town's savior (that plot has developed into a familiar trope) but that he has visions, which we get to see, and that friendship and his relationship with his sister and his bully are more important in ParaNorman than any rigorously gendered love plot. The heterosexual love plot is avoided completely in the movie, and the entire thing is inventive and charming, perhaps even... paradorable. (Forgive me.)

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #16 out of 63

The Pirates! Band of Misfits

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Peter Lord

Cast: Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, David Tennant, Imelda Staunton, Salma Hayek, Jeremy Piven, Anton Yelchin, Brendan Gleeson

In Britain this movie was called The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists!, a title I much prefer to The Pirates! Band of Misfits, but I don't suppose that matters much. Pirates! is very funny – in the vein of Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-rabbit. Plus the side characters are Charles Darwin and Queen Victoria. There are lots of laughs to be had using those two as antagonists to a pirate captain. Still, there are odd things about this movie. For example: Why is there so much computer animation in a stop-motion picture? The two styles jar when placed next to one another. And why is the Pirate Captain never given a name other than the Pirate Captain? Surely a funny name could have been fabricated. Honestly, though, I think this film is probably worth your time. It's rather delightful even if it looks odd.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #33 out of 63