Countdown to the Oscars: Best Animated Feature

We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.

Best Animated Feature

The nominees are:

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

The Sea Beast

Turning Red

This is the best chance yet for another studio to break the stranglehold of Disney-Pixar on this category. We went in depth on the numbers last year, but just to refresh: In 21 years, Pixar has won this award 11 times, Disney four times, and Dreamworks twice. Among last year’s nominees were two Disney films and a Pixar production. Disney’s Encanto took home the award. 

Pixar and Dreamworks are back again this year with a nominee each, but they look more vulnerable than ever to a pair of surprising challengers. We talked about Netflix last year as a likely major player in this category for the foreseeable future as the streamer has the money and the motivation to chase down a win here. Fittingly, two of this year’s nominees come from Netflix. The other is a fascinating independent experiment with some big-name backers. 

However all of this shakes out for the 2022 Oscars, what will be more fascinating will be to watch the coming years: Is there a changing of the guard happening and what will it mean for the future of animation?

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio – I watched three versions of the Pinocchio story in 2022. In anticipation of the coming adaptations by Robert Zemeckis and Guillermo del Toro, I fired up Disney+ and watched the 1940 Disney animated feature with which most folks are familiar. It had been decades since I had last seen it, and I wanted to refresh my memory. The animation is strong, but the basic story has some problems that no adaptation has yet solved. The Zemeckis “live-action” version is a strange beast, indeed, though it did not deserve quite the level of hate it received. However, del Toro’s version, I think, highlights the pitfalls of this story.

Del Toro is a wonderful filmmaker, a tremendous visual stylist, and seemingly an all-around nice guy. The designs of the stop-motion puppets used in this Netflix-produced adaptation are singular and instantly recognizable. The director makes a few interesting story choices with the Blue Fairy and tellingly converts the familiar tropes of Pleasure Island into a fascist boys camp. He has a lot on his mind, and the movie is consistently visually inventive, and yet, I could not help but feel my attention wane. Perhaps there is something in the story of a puppet who longs to be a boy that lacks appeal to me. 

Here’s what I think is the main problem in every version of this story I have seen and certainly with the three I watched in the past year: Pinocchio is kind of a cypher as a character. Though he has clearly defined wants and goals, he mostly wanders haphazardly through the events of the story. Things just happen to him, and it’s a lot to ask an audience to be stuck with a character this guileless for the length of a feature. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is fine and clearly a labor of love. It’s the best version of this story I have seen, but I think the ceiling might be a little low on this beloved tale.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On – I mean this in the nicest way possible because I genuinely loved this movie, but this is absolutely the hipster pick. Distributed in the US by A24 and produced independently, this adaptation of a series of viral web shorts grabs hold of your heart strings and never lets go. The story is as simple as it comes – a little shell, voiced by co-creator Jenny Slate – wants to be reunited with his family. But, writers Slate, Nick Paley, and Dean Fleischer Camp, who also directed, tap into the thematically rich veins of love, loss, and grief.

Isabella Rossellini voices Marcel’s grandmother, Nana Connie, and provides the best evidence yet of the need for a voice acting category at the Academy Awards. In just a few short words, Rossellini conveys a lifetime of experiences and regrets. It is magnificent work that helps ground the second half of the story in recognizable human emotion, despite the fact that these are inch-tall shells. By the end, you feel much the same as the human characters in the film: devoted to the happiness and wellbeing of this little guy trying to navigate a big world.

Turning Red – It has been so long since Domee Shi’s excellent Pixar-backed film came out – as of Oscar night, it will have been exactly one year and one day – that it might be easy to forget how much of a cultural lightning rod it became upon its release. Much of the faux controversy, which nonetheless led to some real insights, centered on one particularly tone-dead and wrongheaded review of the film by a white male writer who saw no value in the story of a young Chinese girl from Toronto and her coming of age.

The inanity of this argument is hopefully self-evident and I have no interest in re-litigating it here. This is only to say that for a few weeks there, Turning Red was at the center of an important cultural conversation. Now, a year later, it’s hard to remember this film being at the center of anything. It is a lovely story of friendship, forgiveness, and the difficulties of growing up and honoring yourself and your family, but it feels like its release at the beginning of the year sapped any potential momentum for a win. Otherwise, this would be a very traditional frontrunner in this category.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish – On the other end of the spectrum, you can see the latest installment in the Shrek/Puss in Boots franchise in theaters right now. I did. The film has been the recipient of quite a lot of breathless praise and somewhat confoundingly is ranked No. 99 on the list of greatest films of all time on the cinephile website Letterboxd. Chalk it up to recency bias or perhaps the generally poor quality of most other kids films, but essentially, people lost their minds over this movie.

It’s a bit much, and that’s coming from someone who generally liked the film. I have only seen the first Shrek movie and never saw the first Puss in Boots, but I was entertained throughout. Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek are winning as the central heroes, and the action scenes are well executed, but I have read multiple reviews refer to these as some of the best action sequences of the 21st century. That just ain’t so. It’s hype the movie can’t sustain, but if you meet it on its terms, the experience is quite fun and charming.

The Sea Beast – The same can’t be said for the other Netflix entry in this year’s lineup, which starts out strong but loses steam around the halfway mark then fizzles out by the end. The film follows a young girl who wants to hunt monsters as she tags along with a monster hunter who wants to make a name for himself. The monsters ultimately turn out to be more than meets the eye. It’s a fun, intriguing premise, but the movie ties itself in knots in the third act as it introduces so many villains and plot twists that by the end you forget exactly what it is you’re rooting for. And, this might be picking nits, but I thought the design of the monsters – a place where this movie should shine – left a little something to be desired.

The final analysis

Now is a good time to talk about the animation styles of these movies. Turning Red, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and The Sea Beast are all computer animated, resembling virtually all the other winners in this category over the years. Meanwhile, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is fully stop-motion, and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is a stop-motion, live-action hybrid.

In the 21-year history of this award, only twice has it not gone to a computer animated film. The first time was in 2002, the second year of the award, when Hayao Miyazaki’s breathtaking hand-drawn work on Spirited Away earned the Japanese master his first and, to date, only Oscar. The second was the Aardman Animation stop-motion horror-comedy Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in 2005. For the past 16 years in a row, all computer-generated films. I expect this year to break that streak.

If we are going to invent a battle here, it is between the del Toro film and the little shell that could, but I actually think Pinocchio is way out in front. It has already won a ton of awards, del Toro is a beloved figure in the Academy with two Oscars to his name already, and as mentioned up top, Netflix has money to burn on pushing this film over the finish line. If it does win, it will be an exciting precedent breaker for this category and will open up the door to a potentially exciting future for animation at the Academy Awards.

Will win: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Should win: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Next time: Animated Short