Where is the buzz for "My Father's Dragon"?

by Nathaniel R

"Too much of a good thing" sounds like an oxymoron but it's something that can happen. It's difficult to look at this year's Best Animated Feature Race for instance and not wonder whether Netflix's endless supply of movies is not totally working. This year alone they have enough contenders to fill up literally that entire Oscar category all by themselves and all of them come from previous Oscar nominees: Richard Linklater's nostalgia piece Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, Chris Williams' animated adventure The Sea Beast, Henry Selick's horror-comedy Wendell & Wild and Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio next month.

Somehow Netflix's fifth contender, Cartoon Saloon's My Father's Dragon (which began streaming this month) has generated little press despite being quite charming, beautiful to look at, and also arriving with a ready made Oscar pedigree...

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Chart Updates: Best Animated & Documentary Features

by Nathaniel R

"All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" won Venice, but nothing is ever locked for the Documentary nominations as they pass over many frontrunners.

Happy weekend, Oscar fantastics. Figured it was time to finally put up the Documentary Feature chart now that we know several of the potential biggies. How do we suddenly know them given that documentaries arrive each and every week with little indication of whether they'll be Emmy or Oscar fodder? The answer is three key buzz-boosting factors...

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Links/News

• NYT Fun Avatar Way of the Water discussion with James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldaña, and Sam Worthington
• Mashable a list of family-safe horror movies if you like spooky but hate gore (this describes me!)
• IndieWire first gushing reactions to Black Panther Wakanda Forever
• Parade Comprehensive Jessica Chastain interview. She wants to remake Death Becomes Her which... sorry, why not just a legacy sequel with new character? Streep & Hawn are still with us

More after the jump including Paul Mescal, Lupita Nyong'o, James Gunn, Jennifer Lawrence and Everything Everywhere All At Once Oscar campaigning...

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EFA Nominations: Comedy, Short, Animated Feature

by Nathaniel R

LITTLE NICHOLAS - HAPPY AS CAN BE (France/Luxembourg)

The European Film Awards announce in lots of small increments for reasons that have never been entirely clear to us. But here we are. So it is today that we learned that Italian Director Marco Bellochio has won Innovation in Storytelling for his miniseries Exterior Night (a follow up to his 2003 feature Goodmorning Night) and full nominations for three categories have been announced including Animated Feature (now updated with winners as of 12/12)...

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Review: "Inu-Oh", a punk riot and true spectacle

by Nathaniel R

Last week we had the pleasure of an invitation to the East Coast premiere of the anime rock opera Inu-Oh, which opens in theaters today. It's distributed by GKids, a company which has long championed non-Hollywood animation for US audiences who we all know can be stubbornly myopic about animation, viewing it as a genre rather than a medium capable of all kinds of genres and visual experiences. The screening was at Japan Society here in Manhattan. I bring this up primarily because I had somehow never been there and must highly recommend the venue which has monthly screenings of both anime films and acclaimed live action Japanese films, too (recent films included everything from Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke to the kaiju film Mothra, to Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha).  Seeing specialty films, which generally play to tiny arthouse crowds, in a beautiful respectful context to a large packed crowd is always a thrill (one of the reasons film festivals, never lose their thrill).

And Inu-Oh deserves a big screen so don't wait until streaming if it hits a theater near you...

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