Mariah Carey and Whitney Huston perform a song from THE PRINCE OF EGYPT at the Oscars.
Before implementing the Best Animated Feature category, the Academy gave out three special awards over six decades honoring individual achievements in the art of feature-length animation – Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Toy Story were the honorees. It was only in the new millennium that AMPAS finally buckled to rising pressures and created the official prize. In 2001, this Oscar was finally established. As we ready ourselves for the Supporting Actress Smackdown of 1998, it's easy to wonder what would have happened if the category had been around a few years earlier…
The second half of the 1990s represented a revolution in the way animated cinema was perceived within Hollywood. The Disney Renaissance had brought upon record-breaking hits and a newfound critical relevance for animated cinema. Beauty and the Beast became the first animated Best Picture nominee in 1991. This created an environment where more studios were willing to bet on cartoons, increasing the number of annual releases exponentially. A market heretofore dominated by one company was competitive, at last. The growing relevance of anime, imported from Japan, also added fuel to the fire.
1998 is a crucial year when it comes to setting the table for a Best Animated Feature Oscar. During the making and release of The Lion King, corporate schisms had led Jeffrey Katzenberg to leave Disney and found DreamWorks Animation. Armed with insider knowledge and a greedy understanding of what the public wanted, the man built up his studio as a direct challenger of Disney's hegemony. In the year we're analyzing, the rivalry manifested in the release of two titles, each created to directly challenge the House of Mouse and their new Pixar projects. Box-office-wise, Katzenberg's old affiliates won the war of '98, but that there was a war at all was already cause for celebration.
Indeed, perusing the eligibility list for the 71st Academy Awards, one finds seven animated features, four of which were recognized by the musical branch with nominations and even a win. If we added international releases to the number, there would have been even more contenders for a hypothetical Best Animated Feature Oscar. Either way, counting only the titles already eligible for the Academy Awards, it's possible to formulate a likely ballot. If the category had existed in 1998 and had three nominees, they would have been:
A BUG'S LIFE (Pixar)
If not for Katzenberg's doing, A Bug's Life would have been the second-ever CGI animated feature instead of the third. In any case, Pixar's follow-up to Toy Story proved that this new kind of animation wasn't a gimmick or a fad. Moreover, it showcased a substantial technological development, assuring the public that the technique was good for more than stories about plastic characters. It's interesting then that a movie of such historical importance is also so oft-forgotten. In some ways, A Bug's Life is the victim of its own best qualities – smallness, humility, and a taste for microcosmic world-building.
Transfering the Seven Samurai narrative model to a cartoon about invertebrates, John Lasseter and company developed a story that's not especially interesting or original. A Bug's Life further takes its setting as ornamental rather than something that informs the text. The movie's pure fantasy, anti-entomological in every possible way. It is, however, a great foundation unto which the filmmakers were able to build a splendorous game of scale, with miniature spaces presented from an anthropomorphic ant's point-of-view. The colors are intoxicating, and the lighting is even better, making for a kinetic marvel of ever-pleasant visuals.
The Oscar-nominated music is also great, though it's the sound effects work that takes the cake. All that, and it's a fun ride, full of memorably designed characters. If the Best Animated Feature Oscar existed back then, this would have been a shoo-in nominee, though a win feels less secure. Its competition is mighty.
MULAN (Disney)
In the annals of Disney animation history, Mulan holds a special place. On the one hand, it was the first film to be wholly animated in the Florida studios founded in 1988. But, on the other hand, it also represented Disney's first foray into non-Western folklore and mythology, after decades working within a milieu that privileged European storytelling tradition above all others. Even Aladdin, as much as it takes from Arabic culture, owes more to western translations, adaptations, and understandings of One Thousand and One Nights. Better yet, beyond nodding at another culture in its story, Mulan also imagines an animation style extrapolated from Ancient Chinese art.
The best example of this is the film's opening. No, not that Great Wall-set prologue. It's the credits sequence that genuinely shows the fantastic beauty of Mulan, its aesthetic specificity within the Disney canon. Watercolor and black ink, bleeding their way through paper and silk, paint stylized landscapes that look unlike anything in Disney's animation until then. The movie's also an outlier in that it tangentially deals with sexuality, female desire and identity, gender norms, and their transgression. This helps it work as a rather elegant bit of character-driven cinema that's still open to dramatic shifts in tone and exquisite action set pieces.
As much as I regard the film with the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, some issues are impossible to ignore. The humor, for instance, feels incredibly shoe-horned into the flick, and the characters are all derived from American cartoon archetypes rather than Chinese mythos. As a result, it's fractured and unbalanced. But, in the end, and for our sake, the good outweighs the bad. Considering it was nominated for a Best Score Oscar, it's easy to imagine this smash-hit getting an Animated Feature nod if the category had been in place in 1998.
THE PRINCE OF EGYPT (DreamWorks)
This might be a controversial opinion, but it must be said that The Prince of Egypt is one of the most successful Biblical epics Hollywood ever produced. Yes, better than De Mille's campy Ten Commandments. Trying to be both a piece of blockbuster entertainment for the whole family as well as an exercise in spiritual enlightenment, The Prince of Egypt adapts the first half of Exodus into a Broadway-style musical in the same vein of Disney's 90s hits. That it fails in theology is beside the point since the need for entertainment is so splendidly answered. Moreover, DreamWorks Animation's sophomore picture is bursting at the seams with cinematic grandeur.
The opening sequence set to the film's best song, "Deliver Us," is an operatic showstopper, so impressive it makes the rest of The Prince of Egypt pale in comparison. Unfortunately, none of what follows achieves the same miraculous play with scale and po-faced drama, but it's still unbelievably engrossing. Even from an atheist perspective, the narrative is gripping, reshaping Moses' storyline as an ever-present conflict between the desire for familial peace and the duty to one's community. Even Rameses' character, changed as it is from the Old Testament, manages to be a fascinating figure and a great showcase of human figure animation. In the end, the movie's beautiful beyond belief and features a crowning achievement in Hans Zimmer's career as a composer.
As much as Mulan is outstanding and was the biggest-grossing animated feature of 1998, it feels like the hypothetical Oscar would have been won by DreamWorks rather than Disney. The Prince of Egypt was released late in the year, right in the heart of the prestige-movie season, putting it in a great position to grab the attention of AMPAS' voters. Moreover, its serious tone and monumental scope had a sheen of respectability to the musical epic. Indeed, even without a category to honor animated features exclusively, The Prince of Egypt still managed to win an Oscar – Best Original Song for "When You Believe."
The other animated contenders in the Academy's eligibility list were less consistent quality-wise. Warner Bros' Quest for Camelot managed to win a Best Original Song nomination, but it was justly torn apart by critics. Nickelodeon had The Rugrats Movie while DreamWorks rushed the completion of Antz to open before A Bug's Life. That quickened production schedule has noticeable effects, though the humor and general design are the picture's principal problems. The last film to mention is Bill Plympton's I Marriage a Strange Person! which would have been an admirably out-there and artsy pick for the Academy at this point in history.
Do you agree with these Oscar-y conjectures? Also, what's your pick for Best Animated Feature of 1998?