War Isn't Over: The Oscars' Animation Nominees
It's a sombre year in the shorts category
Welcome to post number two. This one is a bit of an anomaly, as it is about breaking news: the Oscar nominations announced earlier today. In the future, for the most part, I’ll be reflecting on older things.
The Oscars are silly. It isn’t just the sight of famous people in a collective state of enforced merriment. It’s also the oddities of the voting process itself, where promotional campaigns and industry connections count for so much, and some voters apparently don’t even bother to watch all the nominated films. Animation people have particular grievances against the Academy, which loves to patronise them, whether by getting literal children to host chats with the nominees or by asking actors who’ve played Disney princesses to present the award—and, yes, insinuate that animation is for kids while they’re at it.
Also, when it comes to the animation categories, Disney tends to win. If not them, another major American studio.
But here’s the thing—the thing that makes the animation community so ambivalent about the whole affair: the Oscars are also important, because they influence what gets made. A nomination or win can ease the path to new work, including well-paid commissions.1 It looks good on funding applications. This is starkly felt in the precarious world of indie animation, where money is scarce. A nominee may find that friends and relatives, once sceptical that their work in animation amounted to a real career, are newly respectful. Directors who toiled for years in obscurity to make their film are naturally hungry for it to be recognised, and there’s no more prominent recognition than Oscar success. The realist in me knows this and is happy for the nominees.
So: the nominees. I’ll focus on the shorts, because they are a fascinatingly eclectic bunch, and they draw less attention than the features (no one places bets on shorts). The category has become more receptive to independent films lately—a change that may well be linked to the Academy’s efforts to broaden its membership.
This year continues that trend. Such Hollywood-light line-ups are rare. Disney won’t win, because it isn’t even in contention: voters could have nominated what amounts to a Disney commercial—the self-commemorative IP-fest Once Upon a Studio—but didn’t. That’s something.
Only one of the five nominees can really be said to be a big-studio production: War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko. The title is awkward but the story is told well enough. Despite being separated by battle lines, soldiers from opposing sides in World War One play a game of chess, their moves relayed by carrier pigeon; the bond they form will later help bring about a ceasefire, declared as John and Yoko’s half-century-old protest song crashes in on the soundtrack. The film ticks all the boxes for Oscar success: a sentimental story, a timely message, famous names in the credits (Yoko Ono and Sean Ono Lennon helped finance it), and Hollywood-grade production values: the director is Dave Mullins, an ex-Pixar animator who was nominated for his short Lou (2017), and the film was produced by Wētā FX (of Lord of the Rings fame) alongside the young LA studio ElectroLeague.
Another nominee that carries grim relevance is Letter to a Pig, Tal Kantor’s haunting reflection on how the Holocaust is remembered in Israel. Speaking to a class of schoolkids, an elderly survivor recalls how a pig helped save him from the Nazis. Some children snigger, but one girl is deeply impressed by his words, and her imagination becomes busy with thoughts of forgiveness and revenge. I’ve watched Letter to a Pig several times, and while I’m not sure I’ve fully unpicked the complex symbolism of the pig, I admire Kantor’s range of visual language and bold two-act storytelling. The film was co-produced by Miyu, the French studio for which I recently worked (on a separate project).
It’s a good day for Miyu, whose distribution arm earned a second nomination, for Stéphanie Clément’s Pachyderme. Non-American distributors rarely score two in a year (though Miyu itself also managed this six years ago). Pachyderme opens on a deceptively pretty magic-hour vision of a quiet French village, but shadows creep in, setting the tone for revelations of the darkest kind. The protagonist speaks in voiceover, in language that sometimes sounds a touch too writerly; a friend said she’d like to see a version of the film without dialogue, and I agree. That said, it is a skilfully constructed work that unfolds through metaphors and insinuations, and is all the more powerful for it.
Meanwhile, Iran has scored its first ever nomination in the category with Our Uniform, directed by Yegane Moghaddam. To add to the achievement, Moghaddam produced the film herself. A woman remembers her schooldays in Iran in terms of the uniform she wore; the director’s own clothes are the canvas on which she paints, effectively combining 2D and stop-motion animation. I haven’t seen the film in over a year, but I remember being impressed by the mixed-media approach, which was deftly executed with no sense of gimmick. Again, with the unrest recently playing out in Iran, Our Uniform is unfortunately topical.
That leaves Ninety-Five Senses, in which a death-row inmate reflects on his life, his reminiscences framed through the prism of each of his five senses in turn. It’s an interesting idea, but it makes for an unbalanced film: some senses are easier to dramatise through film, and in the event, some sections are far more important to the narrative than others. Each part was handled by a different artist or team (based in Latin America, the UK or the US), and the film was backed by the non-profit MAST. In its production set-up, then, it’s pretty indie. But the directors, Jared and Jerusha Hess (Napoleon Dynamite), are known in Hollywood, as is Tim Blake Nelson, who lends his voice.
This year’s nominees are an unusually sombre bunch, telling stories of the gravest human dramas with only splashes of humour. That may say something about the world we’re living in, or about the Academy’s desire to move away from animation’s kiddie stereotypes, or both. Four—including the three directed by women—are films of psychological intimacy, their stories unfolding through memory and imagination. Most (arguably all) the nominees address charged social topics, and in the future, I’d like to see voters reward more films with adult subject matter that doesn’t centre clearly on a hot-button issue. But on the whole, I like this line-up.
A quick note on the animation features: the surprise nominee here is Robot Dreams, Pablo Berger’s delightfully earnest silent romance about a dog and his benign robot companion. The Spanish-French film has beaten the Chicken Run sequel, the Super Mario and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, and Disney’s Wish to a place on the list—quite a feat, though the film has drawn only love and praise since premiering at Cannes.
Sony’s frantic sequel Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is probably the film to beat, but Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron could take it. Miyazaki’s Spirited Away remains the only film not in the English language ever to win this award, and despite the news that the 83-year-old director is working on a new film, a valedictory air clings to The Boy and the Heron. And there’s nothing the Academy likes more than to celebrate a career well spent.
[Edit 24/01] Iran isn’t the only country to score a first nomination in the animated shorts category this year: I think it’s a first for Israel too, via “Letter to a Pig” co-producer The Hive Studio.
I’ve also heard it argued that Oscar success can actually work against a filmmaker, because potential clients presume that their fees have risen too high and so decide not to approach them in the first place. I haven’t looked into this in detail.
Thankyou.
Very nice and fair article. Nice one Alex