Clay time
The best animated feature Oscar race already has two unlikely front-runners.
By Ray Richmond It has been a big year for Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs, who has spearheaded innovation after innovation with various permutations of the iconic iPod. But there's one thing Jobs, also chairman and CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, won't have this year: an Oscar-nominated film to call his own.
That's right. Pixar isn't getting a three-peat opportunity after the studio won the Academy Award the past two years with Buena Vista's "Finding Nemo" and "The Incredibles" in 2004 and 2005, respectively. (The studio's next feature, "Cars," doesn't roll into theaters until next year.)
In fact, contenders receiving the most Oscar buzz this year are not even computer-generated projects.
Instead, the big news this time is old news.
The surprise trend is the reemergence of stop-motion animation as a big-screen and potential Oscar heavyweight. DreamWorks' "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit," which earned $16 million at the domestic boxoffice during its opening weekend in October, and Warner Bros. Pictures' "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride," which took in more than $19 million stateside for its first weekend in wide release in September, are the forces to be reckoned with, pundits say, and are seen as favorites on the top animated feature list. Also in the running are DreamWorks' May megahit "Madagascar," Buena Vista's "Chicken Little" (which opened Friday) and the June opener "Howl's Moving Castle" (the Americanized version of Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki's film) and the planned December release "Hoodwinked," the Weinstein Co.'s revisionist take on the "Little Red Riding Hood" tale.
Others include Fox's March opener "Robots," produced by Blue Sky Studios, and Buena Vista's August release "Valiant" (with the studio's February release "Pooh's Heffalump Movie" a long-shot entry).
Animation magazine editor Ramin Zahed believes "Bride" and "Wallace" have raised the bar in the category due to factors that extend beyond their format, reducing any sense of gimmickry.
"These films can easily go head-to-head-to-head with many of the releases in the live-action arena when it comes to top-notch screenwriting, directing, acting, music and achievements in all of the technical areas," Zahed says.
The films celebrate stop-motion animation, a style that's as grueling and painstaking as it is energetic, requiring a lone animator to push around a puppet in a dark room for days and weeks at a clip, shooting one frame at a time.
"Bride" features the voices of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson, Tracey Ullman and Albert Finney and tells the story of an eyeball-popping, maggot-infested dead beauty (Carter) and a man (Depp) who becomes her unwitting would-be groom. It's similar in style and substance to another Burton stop-motion effort, 1993's "The Nightmare Before Christmas," though as Burton himself points out, "These puppets have a bit more sophistication in 'Corpse Bride' than they did in 'Nightmare,' and, in my view, there's more subtlety all around."
"Wallace," meanwhile, continues the tale of googly-eyed human Wallace and his dog, Gromit, in a typically twisted story surrounding a giant vegetable competition and a variety of colorful would-be saboteurs.
This is the first "Wallace" feature from "Chicken Run" writer/producer/director Nick Park, who already has plenty of Oscar honors to his credit. His first "Wallace" effort, "A Grand Day Out," earned an Academy Award nomination for best animated short film in 1991, and follow-ups "The Wrong Trousers" and "A Close Shave" won the big trophy in the same category in 1994 and 1996, respectively.
Jerry Beck, an animation historian and author of the recently published reference book "The Animated Movie Guide," sees "Wallace" as the favorite to cart home the Oscar.
"I think it's a shoo-in," Beck says. "The craft is there, it has laughs, humor, heart -- the whole package. I can't see it not winning, though I add the caveat that I haven't yet seen 'Chicken Little.'"
Both Beck and Zahed applaud "Castle" -- originally produced in Japan and dubbed into English with such voice actors as Lauren Bacall and Christian Bale. But the film, one of the few Oscar contenders shot in the traditional 2-D style, figures to suffer from the fact that it fared poorly in its limited release, taking in only $4.7 million stateside.
"Academy (of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) voters may also feel that they've already honored Miyazaki by giving him the Oscar in 2003 for 'Spirited Away,'" Zahed stresses.
"Castle" producer/co-director Rick Dempsey gives full credit to Miyazaki's vision for the film's quality and says that "whatever success we had in the English adaptation was because of him. But we were fortunate to have such a spectacular voice cast."
"Robots," in contrast to both "Castle" and "Valiant's" boxoffice take (the latter nabbed $19 million stateside), was a triumph, taking in $128 million during its domestic springtime run. While Beck calls "Robots" a long shot to earn one of three coveted Oscar nom slots, Zahed believes that "it would be nice to see it get a nomination, simply because it was a fantastic-looking, good-hearted yarn that somehow got lost in the shuffle in the first-quarter releases."
More optimistically positioned in terms of its Oscar credentials is "Madagascar," a genuine blockbuster that earned just short of $200 million during the summer. It's the tuneful story of a lion (Ben Stiller), a zebra (Chris Rock), a hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) and a giraffe (David Schwimmer) who escape from New York's Central Park Zoo, only to find themselves on a ship en route to Africa.
"I'm really proud of how we pushed the envelope on the animation style," "Madagascar" producer Mireille Soria says. "(It is) a nice combination of 2-D squash-and-stretch and more sophisticated motion. (Our look) is seamless. We feel like we pushed (CG) further than ever before."
After modest returns for "Castle," "Valiant" and "Heffalump" (which also earned $19 million domestically), Buena Vista's last shot to salvage its animation year is "Chicken Little," some 51⁄2 years in the making and featuring the voices of Zach Braff, Joan Cusack, Amy Sedaris and Don Knotts. It's a highly stylized CG undertaking that enjoyed good advance buzz. One of the unique gambits undertaken by the filmmakers involves the simultaneous release of a digital 3-D version of the film in some 85 theaters nationally that will require patrons to wear special glasses.
"What has us really excited," offers "Chicken Little" director Mark Dindal, "is the fact that we've got great crossover appeal. The date-night crowd came to one of our previews and responded really well. Kids will obviously be into it, but we seem to be embraced all over the map."
Adds producer Randy Fullmer: "This is a true character piece. The humor comes out of the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the characters, which is the way it is in the best animated features."
Finally in the Oscar animation derby, there's the whimsical "Hoodwinked," the CG-animated takeoff on "Little Red Riding Hood" that premiered this year at the Festival de Cannes -- where it was picked up by Harvey Weinstein and his Weinstein Co. for North American distribution. The gumshoe take on the classic fable features the voices of Anthony Anderson, Jim Belushi, Andy Dick, Anne Hathaway, Chazz Palminteri, David Ogden Stiers, Sally Struthers and Patrick Warburton.
The plan is to have it break on some 1,800 screens on Dec. 25, a testament to the commitment and clout of Weinstein and his love of the film. It makes "Hoodwinked" the first independently funded film of its kind to be made outside the studio system and earn a theatrical release.
"To have someone like Harvey Weinstein take us under his wing makes all the difference," "Hoodwinked" co-writer/producer/director Cory Edwards says. "We were flattered by his involvement, his scrutiny, his attention. Getting him as a distributor gives us a happy ending. |
