Oscar Animation: Quantity over Quality
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences--the overly grand name for the folks in the film biz who congratulate themselves each year by handing out Oscars--have already put forth the list of 16 potential films for the Academy's consideration for the 2007 Oscar for Best Animated Feature. The sheer number of contenders (which is still provisional) hasn't been this high since the 2003 awards, in which the Oscar went to Hayao Miyazaki's sumptuous classic Spirited Away.
2007 looks like more of the same: The quantity is there, but as for the quality...
Let's see what we have. The Ant Bully, Happy Feet, Arthur and the Invisibles, Barnyard, Cars, The Wild, Curious George, Everyone’s Hero, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Flushed Away, Over the Hedge, Monster House, Open Season, A Scanner Darkly, Renaissance, and Paprika.
Sixteen features, and, let's be honest: did you actually want to see any of them?
That Disney is represented by Cars and The Wild shows just how far the studio has sunk from its glory days. Some of the films are not only dreck, but almost identical dreck: The Wild, Open Season, Over the Hedge, Barnyard.
Only three of the films at least try to push the envelope; A Scanner Darkly and Renaissance, though, basically work the same territory with heavy rotoscoping.
If there were any justice in Hollywood, the Oscar would go to the only film of the bunch with the creativity to qualify as art and science: Paprika. The latest feature by Satoshi Kon, creator of Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paranoia Agent, continues his playing around with perception, blurring the lines between reality and illusion, the objective and the subjective. This time, science creates yet another labor-saving device. This one, however, plugs into a mental patient's thoughts, in hopes of uncovering the deep-seated problem.
It's not just Kon's visuals, which are among the best in the business, or the fact that the coolly logical scientist and her alter-ego Paprika are voiced by anime character goddess Megumi Hayashibara. But the other films, for the most part, have given up. They're content to pitch the pre-pubescent set, expecting that the next generation will glom onto the old.
2007 looks like more of the same: The quantity is there, but as for the quality...
Let's see what we have. The Ant Bully, Happy Feet, Arthur and the Invisibles, Barnyard, Cars, The Wild, Curious George, Everyone’s Hero, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Flushed Away, Over the Hedge, Monster House, Open Season, A Scanner Darkly, Renaissance, and Paprika.
Sixteen features, and, let's be honest: did you actually want to see any of them?
That Disney is represented by Cars and The Wild shows just how far the studio has sunk from its glory days. Some of the films are not only dreck, but almost identical dreck: The Wild, Open Season, Over the Hedge, Barnyard.
Only three of the films at least try to push the envelope; A Scanner Darkly and Renaissance, though, basically work the same territory with heavy rotoscoping.
If there were any justice in Hollywood, the Oscar would go to the only film of the bunch with the creativity to qualify as art and science: Paprika. The latest feature by Satoshi Kon, creator of Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paranoia Agent, continues his playing around with perception, blurring the lines between reality and illusion, the objective and the subjective. This time, science creates yet another labor-saving device. This one, however, plugs into a mental patient's thoughts, in hopes of uncovering the deep-seated problem.
It's not just Kon's visuals, which are among the best in the business, or the fact that the coolly logical scientist and her alter-ego Paprika are voiced by anime character goddess Megumi Hayashibara. But the other films, for the most part, have given up. They're content to pitch the pre-pubescent set, expecting that the next generation will glom onto the old.
posted by Patrick Drazen | 11:33 PM
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