Also, the films were not helmed by career animation directors and were instead directed by a pair of filmmakers who are perhaps best known for making live action adventure movies. Happy Feet was made by the Australian visual effects studio Animal Logic and distributed by Warner Brothers while Rango was animated by Industrial Light and Magic and distributed by Paramount vis-a-vie Nickelodeon Movies. For one, both movies were made outside of the usually dominant Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks systems. And yet curious, if perhaps irrelevant, similarities to exist between the two films. One is seen to be one of the most adventurous and exciting high profile animations of the last decade and the other… isn’t. Outside of their basic identies as large budget CGI animated family movies, these two films would seem to have very little in common on the surface. In fact, despite my general apathy for family movies I’ve still managed to every single one of the movies to win this award between 20 with only two exceptions: 2006’s Happy Feet and 2011’s Rango and those two films will be the subjects of today’s article. That having been said the category has, generally speaking, been a pretty reliable indicator of which animated films have entered the zeitgeist. Very recently we’ve also seen a number of more obscure foreign projects getting in, but that pleasant trend has not been prevalent in the category through most of its history. Generally speaking the category tends to have Disney/Pixar battling it out with Dreamworks at the top of the ticket, semi-profitable but slightly artsier movies by companies like Aardman and Ghibli hoping to squeeze in, and all too often some second rate kiddie flick that gets haphazardly thrown in to pad things out. That year they nominated Shreck, Monsters Inc., and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius… yeah, one of these things is not like the other (hint: it’s the one no one has ever thought about since 2001 when not looking back at this award category). The very first year the award was given out proved to be somewhat indicative of their M/O for the first decade or so. Still, it’s a fairly fascinating category in many ways and in recent years it’s actually been producing one of the most diverse and adventurous nominee classes of any Oscar category. Hell, even with this renaissance of diverse animation voices the award has still been won by Disney, Disney subsidiaries, or foreign movies distributed by Disney in ten of the fourteen years that the award has existed. Yeah, maybe Don Bluth or someone might have walked away with the award every once in a blue moon, but Disney’s dominance in the field was pretty much uncontested for decades. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess why it took so long for them to introduce the category in the first place: up until very recently it was kind of a foregone conclusion that Disney would just win every year. I can’t help but wonder if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences realized that they introduced a category for animated features just in time for a sort of golden age in the form. This series is a sequel of sorts to a previous series called Finding Pixar: A Skeptics Journey, which applied the same treatment to the films of the Pixar Animation Studio. The following is an installment in an ongoing series of blog posts analyzing contemporary family films that the author has previously resisted seeing.
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