Tim's Halfway Toons: The year so far in animation
Thursday, July 2, 2015 at 10:41PM ½way mark - part 3 of ?
Tim here. We're spending the first few days of July looking back at the first half of the movie year, and now it's time to glance over the animated features of 2015 so far - about half of the total number of wide releases we should get, including the immediate carved-in-stone frontrunner for the Best Animated Feature Oscar until further notice. Here are some of the noteworthy achievements in the year's cartoons so far.
Best Design
Inside Out's horizonless world inside the mind, full of bright and soft physical depictions of complicated psychological notions, providing a space for the thematic concerns and the grandiose adventure alike to both play out. Bonus points for the unstressed way that, from a sufficient height, it resembles the folds of the brain.
Funniest & Most Accurate Joke
The cat in Inside Out. My fellow cat owners understand why.
Most Creative Animation
The abstract through sequence in Inside Out, a simple but elegant mixture of styles and textures and depth that shows off without distracting from the movie itself.
Best Proof That There Are Other Good Animated Movies Besides Inside Out
The current last ever Studio Ghibli film, When Marnie Was There, is a catalog of all the things that studio does so well: generosity towards all its characters, complex young women dealing with real life issues, lush backgrounds that more resemble fine art than a movie. If this is really the end, the studio left on a high note.
Best-Looking Film That's Ugly as Hell
Strange Magic, the misbegotten George Lucas production whose striking, photorealistic images are in service to designs that look like somebody got bored halfway through making Dungeons & Dragons fanart. Please forgive me for reminding the universe that Strange Magic exists.
Worst Ad Campaign for a Good Movie
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water is, for almost all of its running time, a charming throwback to the beloved TV show. It uses the surrealist jokes strung along a dizzy, fantastic narrative, with proudly old-fashioned 2-D animation that's severely colorful and defiantly flat, powerfully reminding us of the elegant pleasures of hand-drawn animation instead of the ubiquitous rendered models of CGI. Then, for about 15 minutes at the end, it morphs its characters into CGI effects interacting with the real world in what feels as much of a parody of garbage like The Smurfs as an attempt to hop on the bandwagon. Naturally enough, the trailers and TV spots drew almost exclusively from that last 15 minutes.
Unlikeliest Sure-Fire Way to Make Everybody Bawl Like a Child
The goofy-ass lyrics "Who's your friend to likes to play? Bing Bong, Bing Bong!" sound like something a three-year-old made up on the spot, because that's exactly what they literally are in the world of Inside Out. But I'll bet half of the people reading up are already misting up just thinking about that song. Also, I'm done talking about Inside Out.
Most Surprising Hit
Pretty much every box office analyst out there was set to write-off Home as the film that would finally murder DreamWorks Animation. There was even a two-part history right here at the Film Experience based on that assumption (which I otherwise remain very proud of). Instead, the film broke out to become one of the studio's biggest hits in years, after several consecutive underperformers and bombs.
Most Disappointing Hit
Sadly, Home is also tepid junk.
Best Movie That Hasn't Come Out in America
In the United Kingdom, Aardman Animation's Shaun the Sheep Movie had an enormously successful winter release that gained critical raves and an enthusiastic audience for its humor, invention, and warmth, a top-notch kid's movie that's smart and energetic enough for anybody. It's already on DVD in that country, in fact, which is how I know what I'm talking about. Here in the States, we have another month to wait. On the other hands, the Brits still haven't seen Inside Out, so it all comes out in the wash.
Previously: Best Lead Performances & Oscar Chart Updates in Acting
Reader Comments (5)
Mostly this makes me realize that Inside Out is the only animated film I've seen this year. Thanks for the corrective on SpongeBob - your brief description makes it sound many times more interesting than any of the trailers or commercials.
"Strange Magic" will forever remain in my memory on account of the collective groan I heard from a whole audience of kids at the trailer's many lame jokes which concluded with my five old year goddaughter saying "That looks terrible!" It's what I think of whenever I heard someone dismissively claim that kids will like animated crap.
Home did not very well world-wide but it did not do badly either so I guess it can be said to be successful. I think that it was partly because there was nothing else for families between Sponge-Bob and Inside Out aside from it and Cinderella I think. Dreamworks was going to release B.O.O originally in June. If that had happened both Home and B.O.O would have probably have done pretty poorly. So it should show Dreamworks it is better to have some time between films.
Great writing. The brain thing was interesting, but in general, part of what I didn't love about Inside Out is that I didn't really find it beautiful to look at it. I thought they could have done so much more with the dream world.