At the mid-point of our week-long Oscars dialogue, we’re going to take a quick look at some of the “secondary” categories before picking back up with the Big Four categories tomorrow and Friday.
- Up: The obvious favorite for Best Animated Feature
Best Animated Feature
The Nominees: Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Princess and the Frog, The Secret of Kells, Up.
CHRIS HERRINGTON: Still a relatively new category for the Academy Awards and one that seems to be growing up a little as the Academy seems to be finally expanding its definition beyond movies with fast-food tie-ins and we seem to be in a new golden age for animated features. (This is only the second time in nine years of giving the award that there have been a full five nominees.) Still, despite the growing diversity in the field, this award has so-far seemed pretty much designed to recognize the union of art and commerce that is Pixar, the studio that accounts for a full half of the eight winners in this category since it began in 2001 (Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL*E). This year, Pixar makes it five of nine. Will Win: Up.
Should Win: I haven’t seen two of these nominees: The Princess and the Frog, which was surprisingly tagged the year’s best film by Time magazine, and which my normally Disney-hating wife thought was pretty decent, and the obscurity The Secret of Kells, which did not screen locally. The other three — all of which made my 15-film Top Ten list for 2009 — are all films I really like, but I’ll give my nod here to the underdog of the bunch, Coraline, Henry Selick’s stop-motion animation story of a young girl who finds an alternate universe via a path through the wall of her new house. Not only are the visuals beautiful, but the characterizations are surprisingly detailed and perceptive, and the film’s feel for the emotional and psychological terrain of childhood makes it every bit the girls’ answer to Where the Wild Things Are.
