An Academy Award For Anime? (Not Likely)

Once again, there are only enough animated movies eligible for Best Animated Feature to have three nominees. If there are at least 16 eligible films, there can be 5 nominees. There are 14 this year, though.

The 14 contenders are “Bolt,” “Delgo,” “Dragon Hunters,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” “Igor,” “Kung Fu Panda,” “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa,” “$9.99,” “The Sky Crawlers,” “Sword of the Stranger,” “The Tale of Despereaux,” “Waltz With Bashir” “Wall-E” and “Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who.”

“The Sky Crawlers” and “Sword of the Stranger” are anime, distributed by Sony and Bandai, respectively. Most of the others are computer-animated American films, including Disney’s “Bolt,” Fathom Studios’ “Delgo” (which already won awards at the Rome International, Seoul International, Annecy International and the Red Stick Animation Festivals), Exodus Productions’ “Igor,” Dreamworks’ “Kung Fu Panda” and “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa,” Universal Pictures’ “The Tale of Despereaux,” Pixar’s “Wall-E” and Blue Sky Studios’ “Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who.”

As for the others, “Dragon Hunters” is a French computer-animated film, “Fly Me to the Moon” is a Belgian computer-animated film, “$9.99″ is Australian stop-motion and “Waltz With Bashir” is a hand-animated feature produced cooperatively by Israel, Germany and France and directed by Ari Folman.

I actually haven’t seen any of these. However, here are my predictions, if previous Oscars are any indication: “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa,” “Wall-E” and one of the foreign films will be nominated. Neither of the Japanese anime flicks will get it. “Wall-E” will probably win.

What would I like to see happen? One of the Japanese movies gets nominated, along with “Waltz With Bashir” and maybe “Wall-E.”Overall, I’ve become very disenchanted with the Best Animated Feature category. As I wrote about way back in March, anime is always snubbed. The only anime films to ever reach nomination status were “Spirited Away,” which, miraculously, won in 2002, and “Howl’s Moving Castle,” which lost to “Wallace And Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” in 2005. So what are the odds that a non-Disney anime will finally be nominated this year?

I’ve also had enough of these cookie cutter computer-animated movies that get nominated every year. “Bolt”? “Kung Fu Panda?” Enough already. All these American CGI films are the same: Non-human stuff (zoo animals, cars, rats, etc) acting like people. Sprinkle in some gross-out humor and a few “adult” jokes, and there you have it. Entertaining as these movies may be (and I’m not denying that I enjoy a lot of them–I love “Toy Story” and “Ratatouille,” for example), most of them just aren’t what I would consider Oscar-worthy.

(photo credit: w-ode)

April 13th, 2009 by admin | Posted in General | (0)