→ March 3, 2018
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Coco and this year’s animated shorts.

The 2017 slate of big studio animated movies was rather dismal, which I think is going to lead to an easy win for Coco, the best of the batch by any measure, especially since some of the best indie animated films didn’t even score nominations. Coco (available to rent/buy on amazon or iTunes) is genuinely very good, if not really at Peak Pixar levels; it’s better than the sequels Pixar has churned out recently, like Finding Dory and Monsters U., just not at the standard set by films like Up or WALL-E or the Toy Story trilogy.

(I suppose this disclaimer is barely necessary at this point, but just in case: I work for ESPN, which is owned by Disney, which owns Pixar, which made Coco.)

The protagonist of Coco is not actually Coco, but Miguel, a young Mexican boy who wants nothing more in life than to be a musician, but whose great-great-grandfather left his wife and very young daughter, Coco, to pursue his dreams in music. That has made the family extremely bitter towards music, to the point where Miguel has to hide his records and his homemade guitar from his parents and relatives, especially his grandmother, who is basically Nurse Ratchet in abuelita form.

Of course, he gets caught, runs away, and ends up crossing over the bridge to the netherworld where the mostly-dead spirits of the recently deceased reside in relative luxury … as long as someone alive still remembers them. On the Day of the Dead, the spirits can come back to visit their relatives as long as someone has put up their pictures on their ofrendas. Miguel can get back to the land of the living, but wants to do it in a way that doesn’t require him to surrender his dreams of becoming a musician, which leads him to chase down the man he thinks is his deceased great-great-grandfather, the underworld-famous musician Ernesto de la Cruz. (Spoiler alert: It’s not him, and God help you if you didn’t see that one coming.) So Miguel has to learn some important lessons about family, sing a song or two, and eventually get back to the living while also restoring a lost link to his family’s past.

Coco looks great, as all Pixar movies do, although I think since Brave they’ve kind of run up against a barrier of animation quality – Pixar films have blown me away visually so many times in the past that there isn’t much left for them to impress me with. This film is colorful and bright and very appealing, especially the spirit animals of the netherworld, but it’s also what we’ve come to expect from this studio. The story itself is just so-so, although there are plenty of sight gags and a bunch of references that will sail over younger readers’ heads but entertain the parents. (Bonus points for getting my daughter to ask me who Frida Kahlo was.) The setup never really worked for me – the loving parents who are so hellbent on denying Miguel any kind of music, not just saying he can’t pursue it as a career, but proscribing it as even a hobby. His grandmother destroys his handmade guitar, which just does not gibe at all with the rest of her character; no matter how mad you get, you don’t obliterate something your child made.

The best Pixar movies all have intricate plots that drop threads early in the film only to tie them all back together near the end. There are no throwaways in movies like The Incredibles or Toy Story – every detail ends up mattering in a big way. Not only is it satisfying in the moment to see a script recall something from an hour earlier, but it adds to the feeling that these are deep, three-dimensional films to be considered on par with live-action movies. If anything, most live action films would be lucky to bring scripts of the density and sophistication of great Pixar films. Coco isn’t one of these; there’s a single plot strand, established early and handled linearly, without much more. Even the complex structure of the netherworld where the skeleton-souls reside felt too familiar, with shots of the great hall and the stadium both recalling similar settings from Harry Potter films.

In a better year, with a better slate of nominees, I don’t think Coco would be deserving of the Best Animated Feature Oscar it’s going to win. It’s the best of the five nominees, and it’s hard for any other studio to match the sheer quality of the CG animation that comes from Pixar. If you go against them on animation, it has to be to choose something novel like the hand-painted cels of Loving Vincent or the visual style of The Breadwinner. (Let’s not even talk about The Boss Baby.) Tim Grierson and Will Leitch put this at #14 on their ranking of all 19 Pixar feature films, which amounts to dropping it behind all the good ones and ahead of all the mediocre-or-less ones. I can’t disagree.

* I’ve seen all five Best Animated Short Film nominees just in the last 72 hours, as they were all available somewhere for free: “Garden Party,” “Lou,” and “Negative Space” were all on YouTube, although at the moment two are gone; “Dear Basketball” is on Go90; and “Revolting Rhymes” is on Netflix. Of those, ”Revolting Rhymes” would be my pick, as it’s inventive, looks fantastic, and manages to develop some characters … but it’s also two episodes of about 28 minutes each, which exceeds the category’s length threshold, so I don’t know if voters have to consider just one of the two parts. It’s based on a Roald Dahl book of rhymes where he reworks some classic fairy tales to add some macabre twists and change the endings, all told here by a Big Bad Wolf (voiced by Dominic West). My daughter and I enjoyed it quite a bit, although I think she’d vote for “Lou” instead. That Pixar short brings the items in a school playground lost & found to life to teach the class bully a lesson. It’s cute and sweet and probably gets the nod on animation quality.

“Negative Space” is a stop-motion piece from Germany about a young man who is remembering how his father taught him his rather scientific method of packing a suitcase to maximize use of the space therein. It’s just five minutes, and there’s a twist that I think you’ll probably see coming. “Garden Party” also has a twist, and the animation of various tropical frogs taking over an apparently abandoned mansion is cool … but there isn’t really a story here.

And then there’s “Dear Basketball,” which I’m worried will win because it involves Kobe Bryant, even though it is clearly the worst of the five. Bryant penned a letter essentially thanking basketball for the huge, positive influence it has had on his life, which is fine, but not munch of a story. The animation looks like charcoal drawings, which is appealing, but ultimately there is just no there here. If it’s not pointless, the point isn’t very sharp. And that’s without considering the fact that Bryant was accused of rape and chose to pay his accuser to make the charges go away – not someone the Academy should want on its stage anyway, not this year of all years. If this were a truly great short film, maybe there’d be an argument for honoring it anyway, but it’s just not.

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→ February 20, 2018
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Loving Vincent.

One of the five nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (along with the modern classic that is Boss Baby), Loving Vincent stands out primarily for its appearance: It is the first animated film made from hand-painted frames, in this case done with oil paints on canvas. The conceit was to tell a story about Vincent Van Gogh that used his style and even images from his paintings as the background, while actors portrayed the various characters in front of green screens and were painted into the frames. The 94-minute film comprises over 65,000 frames, each its own painting, created by over 120 painters, while the story comes from letters recovered after Van Gogh’s suicide and the subsequent death of his brother, Theo. The plot here is a bit thin, although the work by the actors – who are more than just voice actors here – elevates what story we get. If you appreciate the visual aspects of animated films, though, you won’t be able to take your eyes off the screen. (It’s on iTunes and amazon.)

The story begins a year or so after Van Gogh’s death, when the Postman Joseph Roulin asks his son Armand (Douglas Booth) to deliver a letter from Van Gogh to his brother and patron, Theo, that was somehow lost but serves as the last letter he wrote before he took his own life. The quest to find Theo turns into a deeper interest in learning what happened to Vincent in the last few months of his life, and why a person who claimed six weeks earlier to be in great spirits decided to end his own life. Armand, who’s a bit credulous to be entirely credible here, bounces around like a sort of soft-boiled detective, visiting the guest house where Van Gogh stayed and the doctor who treated him for his depression and, later, who saw him after he’d shot himself. The mystery aspect here – at one point, Armand becomes convinced Van Gogh was shot by someone else, perhaps in a prank gone wrong, and was covering for the culprit – isn’t compelling at all, since there isn’t any real doubt that Van Gogh 1) was suicidal and 2) shot himself, but the story here is the means to the end of walking us through a tour of Van Gogh’s output.

I went into this knowing almost nothing about the works of Van Gogh, and decided to leave any further reading until after I watched it lest I spoil some aspect of the film. The poster for the film uses his 1889 Self-portrait, but you’ll see many of his most famous works as backdrops for critical scenes; I spotted The Night Café, Wheat Field with Cypresses, Wheat field with Crows, The Town Hall at Auvers, The Sower (at the end), and Café Terrace at Night (the opening scene). The filmmakers also used Van Gogh’s paintings to ‘design’ the characters, most of whom are based on real people Van Gogh painted, with other characters created from his paintings. Some of the likenesses are remarkable, especially Jerome Flynn (Bronn in Game of Thrones) as Dr. Gachet, although there was really little they could do here to make Saoirse Ronan look like anyone but herself.

Because the story itself is so slight, Loving Vincent is more of an achievement than a great film; there’s never been a movie that looked like this, and it subtly introduces some of the audience to the works of one of the most important painters in western history, several of whose paintings have sold for nine figures. (Only one of Van Gogh’s paintings sold during his life, out of the 800-plus he painted.) It’s a gorgeous film to watch, and the leisurely pace of the plot fits the content; you’re meant to savor and even examine these backdrops, not to just focus on the action or dialogue. But that also means it’s not a film for everybody; I’m probably on the outer fringes of the audience for this movie, because I know nothing about art and don’t feel like I even appreciate it like most art fans and collectors would. I can say, however, that I understand Van Gogh’s style more now having seen the movie, and would at least be able to identify some of his works as his, which is more than I would take home from most movies I see.

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→ December 13, 2017
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The Breadwinner.

The Breadwinner just earned a nod from the Golden Globes in the Best Animated Film category, and is very likely to get a nomination from the Academy as well in the same field, where it’ll probably be an underdog to Coco but one with more than a puncher’s chance of winning because of the quality and themes of its story and the old-school feel to its animation. It’s not a movie for kids by any means, and the film lacks the feel-good resolution you expect in any animated feature, but none of that should detract from anyone’s appreciation of just how well-made this movie is.

Based very loosely on a 2000 novel by Deborah Ellis, The Breadwinner comes from Cartoon Saloon, the same Irish studio that produced The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, and is set in Kabul under the rule of the Taleban. Parvana is the young daughter of a disabled Afghan veteran who lost part of his leg in the war against the Russians. He is sent to prison early in the film for daring to talk back to a hotheaded young Taleban soldier, leaving Parvana, her unwell mother, baby brother, and older sister with no means of support or way to even go out into the market to procure food, since the Taleban forbade any woman to go out in public without her husband or brother to escort her. Parvana cuts off her hair and wears clothes of her late older brother so she can work odd jobs (with her friend Shauzia, who’s doing the same thing) and go buy food, eventually trying to save enough money to bribe her way into the prison and see her father.

The movie doesn’t shy away from depicting the repressive rule of the Taleban, including a scene where Parvana’s mother is beaten, off-screen but audible, for going out in public and possessing a photograph of her imprisoned husband. Those moments are juxtaposed with a story Parvana tells in pieces over the course of the film, first to her baby brother, then to Shauzia, and eventually to herself, about a young boy who goes to challenge the elephant king who has stolen all of the seeds from his village, threatening the villagers with starvation if they can’t plant their spring crops. The tale is fanciful and magical, providing a hopeful metaphor for the Afghan people suffering under the tyranny of a misogynistic theocracy, but also giving us a subtler way to answer the mystery surrounding the death of Parvana’s brother. This last part lies below the surface of the film’s action, but his death and the trauma it inflicted on the family are all explained by the truth of how he died, which tells a greater truth about life under the Taleban while also showing how recovery was never as simple as deposing them – even after their rule ended, there are still widows, orphans, disabled veterans, other grieving relatives, families left without sources of income, and more.

The split narrative does work against The Breadwinner, however, if you’re expecting something linear, the way nearly all animated film stories are. Parvana’s plot itself is bifurcated by the lengthy stretches where she tries to get to her father’s prison, a separate endeavor from what she’s doing to feed her family, and then split further by the tale she’s spinning in bits and pieces over the course of the entire movie, with the two uniting only at the very end. That conclusion is also itself incomplete, which works within the overall structure of the movie (a ‘happy’ ending would be wildly unrealistic, and nothing that’s come before really presages one), and seems to play a little loose with the geography established earlier in the script – although it does provide one sweet moment where the kindness of a stranger helps Parvana avoid disaster. It’s all one more reason this isn’t a movie for kids or even much younger viewers; the lack of a real resolution, especially with children involved, lingered even for me as an adult (and a parent) for days.

The Breadwinner is a beautiful film that makes effective use of perspective, exaggerating the size of many of the adult characters to emphasize how the world might look to Parvana. Some of the animations look incredibly real, while others are more like caricatures, the latter also having the effect of softening some of the more disturbing edges of the story. It’s been a down year for animation in general, with Coco the only other animated release to earn positive reviews; that said, The Breadwinner would likely be an awards nominee even against stronger competition.

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