Oscar Nominees 2015: Part 8 of 12 (Animated Features)

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7.
Part 8 of 12:

How to Train Your Dragon 2

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Dean DeBlois

Cast: Jay Baruchel, Cate Blanchett, America Ferrera, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Djimon Hounsou, Kristin Wiig, T.J. Miller, Kit Harington

This was just so dang cute, and the dragon who is the star of these films is so gorgeously designed that when he's on screen it is impossible to look at anything else. He's sleek and lovable and charming and who wouldn't want one for her very own? The movie itself is exciting, too. There are hundreds of new species of beautifully drawn dragons, and the plot is moving and sweet without being cloying or absurd. I expect this to win this year, even though I liked Big Hero 6 slightly more. For those of you who want me to say something about The Lego Movie's big snub here, read on.

Will Win: Animated Feature

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #26 out of 80

Big Hero 6

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Don Hall, Chris Williams
Cast: Ryan Potter, Scott Adsit, Maya Rudolph, Daniel Henney, Alan Tudyk, James Cromwell, T.J. Miller, Genesis Rodriguez, Damon Wayans Jr., Jamie Chung

I loved this movie. It's smart and exciting, and beautifully shot. It is also a straight-up action movie, even though it is a movie for kids. And it's filled with science, so that kids can understand just how much fun science can be – and even more, how great it would be if we were using science to do good in the world instead of simply attempting to make more money. The characters are wonderful, and the main creation (his name is Baemax) is lovable and huggable (see above) and is perfectly voiced by Scott Adsit. This is an excellent film. I should say that my favorite animated film of the year was Ari Folman's The Congress, which isn't animated for its entire length, (so I guess it doesn't count?), but this is my favorite of the nominees for sure, and one of my favorite films this year.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Animated Feature

My Rating: #17 out of 80

Song of the Sea

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Tomm Moore

Cast: Lucy O'Connell, David Rawle, Brendan Gleeson, Fionnula Flanagan, Pat Shortt, Lisa Hannigan, Jon Kenny

This is the first of this year's nominees that I haven't seen. Ho hum. It just never played up here in the hinterlands, and it was in Los Angeles too early for me to have seen it there. This was animated by the same folks that brought us The Secret of Kells (also a nominee, for the 2009 season), and by all accounts it is beautiful and everyone loves it. Its appearance on nomination morning was a surprise to many (although not to me), because almost everyone was betting that The Lego Movie would get a nomination for Best Animated Feature. Why everyone liked The Lego Movie is a bit of a mystery to me, but it should have been quite clear that it couldn't have gotten a nomination. It isn't stop-motion animation at all. It's a kind of hybrid thing that pretends to be stop-motion but is actually traditionally animated. The Animation Branch does not value strangely animated pictures: remember The Adventures of Tintin? Or Waking Life? It does love traditional, beautiful, and especially hand-drawn work, which Song of the Sea certainly is. This could win in an upset.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Animated Feature

My Rating: Not Yet Rated

The Boxtrolls

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Graham Annable, Anthony Stacchi

Cast: Isaac Hempstead Wright, Elle Fanning, Nick Frost, Richard Ayoade, Tracy Morgan, Ben Kingsley, Jared Harris, Dee Bradley Baker

I was sort of bored by this. Its themes are very similar to last year's Ernest et Célestine, and it just wasn't as visually intriguing as I wanted it to be. It's cute and charming in a grotesque sort of way (its grotesquerie is definitely part of its attraction), but it is never really more than that. And its plot is sentimental and clichéd. I was disappointed. It's a shame because I really liked Jorge R. Gutierrez's The Book of Life, and it could have had this slot. It was imaginative and beautiful, and the plot was intriguing and clever and had a healthy ironic perspective on itself. Oh well.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #60 out of 80

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (かぐや姫の物語)

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Takahata Isao

Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, James Caan, Mary Steenburgen, Darren Criss, Lucy Liu, Beau Bridges, James Marsden, Oliver Platt, Dean Cain, Daniel Dae Kim, George Segal, John Cho

This was another bit of a disappointment. I've written about this movie already here; its animation is lovely, but the story just isn't that intriguing. One sort of knows how it is going to go before we ever get anywhere. It's an old tale, so that makes a kind of sense, but it just reiterates old clichés about living in the woods and not living in the city, and that we ought to let our children be what they want to be instead of forcing them to be what we want them to be. Important sentiments, no doubt, but not sentiments that need to be told in a film that is longer than two hours.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #53 out of 80

Morality Tales - Japanese and USAmerican

Takahata Isao's The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is, in many ways, a ghost story: the transliteration of the Japanese title, かぐや姫の物語, is Kaguya-hime no Monogatari. In many old Japanese movies that made it to U.S. release, this word monogatari (物語) is featured. It means tale or story or legend, and it comprises the tale/story part of the titles of Mizoguchi's Tales of Ugetsu, Ozu's Tokyo Story, and Misumi's The Tale of Zatoichi. These tales are not necessarily ghost stories, but they are always moral tales, and I had not really remembered that when I went in to see Princess Kaguya. (Frankly, I was just excited to see that it was playing anywhere within an hour of where I live; I drove 60 minutes.)

The moral tale that Princess Kaguya is telling is a tale for adults. This is, in many ways, a film for parents – admonishing them (us) to take care that we do not pressure our children to be something that they do not wish to be. Attempting to transform them into what we think they ought to be only causes heartache and misery, and our children may miss out on happiness altogether.

In Princess Kaguya, a poor, childless bamboo cutter discovers a tiny princess in the forest. He takes her home, where she transforms into a baby. The woodcutter and his wife raise the child as their own. (All children are a gift, the moral says, both the ones that are given to us and the ones that we think we created ourselves.)

The child is happy, learns quickly, grows quickly, but is a little off. The woodcutter decides that she is really a princess and that she ought to be taken to the capital, where she can learn how to be a proper princess. He executes this plan, but of course the girl hates it in the city, away from the bamboo and the wild pigs and the water and wind.

I don't want to say much more about the movie vis-à-vis its plot, but I will say that the movie underlines several other moral lessons. In Kaguya, what is of value are the things we have in our lives – the things we can share with one another or give to those we love – not fantasies about imaginary jewels or magic amulets. Dreams and fantasies are not worth much in this movie, but pheasant stew and mushrooms and fun with friends are worth a great deal.

And the film asks parents to spend time with their children and learn what they want from the world – learn what happiness looks like to them – instead of deciding what happiness ought to look like. (Kaguya literalizes this moral several times.) Life is very short, Kaguya says, and at any time our children, our friends, our money can be taken away from us. We must treasure what we have while we have it.

My gloss of the film makes it seem much more heavy handed than it is. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya isn't quite as on the nose as my description makes it out to be. Its moral lessons are subtle, its animation is beautiful, and I quite liked the film.  

~ ~ ~

But I had the same problem with The Princess Kaguya that I had with Richard Linklater's Boyhood. These are films about parenting: about watching a child grow up and understanding life in new ways by watching a child become someone we didn't originally envision, a person wholly his or her own. But, as Richard Linklater does with Boyhood, Takahata decides to tell his film from the perspective of the child rather than the perspective of the adults. For me, the journey of the child is not that interesting. In fact, it's predictable, even generic. The kids in both films almost always do what is expected of them. They watch their parents in predictable ways, they approach their friends in exactly the ways I expect them to.

Now, these are both films by adults, so while they purport to be giving us the perspective of a child, a way of looking at the world that is new and exciting and fresh and whatever, this isn't true. Both Takahata and Linklater see the world of the child in generic ways, in ways that idealize the experience of a child: the child wishes his parents would stay together and is terrified when they fight, the child wishes to live in the forest with her friends, the child idolizes his father, the child doesn't want to be a lady, she wants to be a tomboy, the child wants to learn to express himself, the child falls in love with the first boy that she meets, the child finds himself inexplicably and unanalytically jealous of his mother's boyfriend.

But although these films tell their stories from the perspective of the child, these are actually just more parental perspectives, covert parental perspectives disguised as children's perspectives. Both Boyhood and Kaguya reenact the failings the adults in their films commit – they are finally more interested in themselves and their own experience of watching the child, of living vicariously through the child, than they are in understanding the child him- or herself.

My big problem with Boyhood is that it is a movie about parenting that continually pretends it is a movie about growing up. It isn't just that I am way more interested in exploring the world of parenting than I am in attempting to relive the experience of growing up (although this is true), it is that so is Richard Linklater. For my money, if both Linklater and Takahata admitted from the start that their movies were about the experience of the parent watching the child grow up, I would have been much more interested in their movies. As it is, both movies are fine, but both simply recreate a nostalgic experience of childhood felt by someone who can't remember any more what being a child was actually like.

Two from J-pan

I'm just becoming acquainted with Yasujirō Ozu. I recently rented Late Spring, which is probably his most famous movie. It's a romantic comedy. Very cute, but incredibly smart. It's about a woman who is a little older than normal marrying age (late spring, get it?) who lives with her widowed father and takes care of him. In order to get her to marry, the father pretends he is going to remarry. This is an incredibly beautiful, lyrical movie about two people who love each other very, very much but have to part. I fell in love with it immediately. The lead actress in the film, Setsuko Hara is beguiling and beautiful, and I fell in love with her as well. Her smile will make you melt, I promise. Ozu is well known to American audiences, so it's kind of embarassing that it has taken me so long to see one of his films. I should never have waited. The next one is one its way.

I also caught Isao Takahata's 1988 anime film Grave of the Fireflies, which is about two young orphans whose parents are killed during the bombings on Tokyo in World War II. The two go to live with their monster of an aunt for a while, but finally shove off on their own. The film begins with the death of the boy, so I guess it isn't giving too much away to say that this is a sad movie that does not end well. The thing is, saying that the movie is sad doesn't do Grave of the Fireflies justice at all. It's easily the saddest animated film I've ever seen. I was a mess. The portrait of devastation in Japan is incredibly moving and this story of a brother and sister trying to survive in the wake of war knows how to pull on its audience's heartstrings. Takahata knows what he's doing, too. He is influenced by the Japanese masters and his work reflects classic Japanese cinema. He even composes one of his shots to look exactly like a famous shot in Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain.