Better Animated Feature: 2004

What's more incredible than The Incredibles?

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Eli: 2004 is a pretty big outlier in the history of this award.

So much digital ink has been spilled (this series included) on the plight of the little guys and how all of the glory goes to Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks. The reality is that most of the time that’s only half correct. Outright victories are somewhat rare, but in most years, lesser known studios get at least one nomination. This was true in each of the first three years of the award.

It was not true for 2004.

In 2004, only three films were nominated. Two of them were from DreamWorks. The other was from Pixar. And y’know what? In retrospect, they got it right; that’s more or less how the shortlist should have looked.

What else were they gonna consider? Howl’s Moving Castle wasn’t released in the United States until 2005 (and it’d get its flowers then). The Polar Express was an awkwardly motion-captured film that was super contentious among critics, to say nothing of the fact that Christmas movies already face an uphill battle.

The only other film we could think to revisit was The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, which was also behind the 8-ball on account of being inextricably tied to an animated series. Nothing else seemed worth it.

2004 is also an outlier in one other, funnier way. To date, it’s the only year in which one studio received all but one nomination for this award, as DreamWorks’ Shark Tale and Shrek 2 accounted for two of the three nominations. And Shrek 2 was extremely popular—the highest-grossing film of 2004, animated or otherwise. I can’t think of another time any studio had a higher chance of winning Best Animated Feature than DreamWorks did in 2004.

Naturally, they lost. Pixar’s The Incredibles took home the hardware.

Did it deserve to?

The Nominees

The Incredibles (won Best Animated Feature)
Shark Tale (nominated)
Shrek 2 (nominated)
The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (snubbed)

The “Best” Animated Feature: The Incredibles

Leah: The Incredibles marked the second consecutive Best Animated Feature win for Pixar. Last year, Eli talked about how Best Animated Feature had gained infamy as “The Pixar Award”, and it looks like the pattern is already emerging. Of course, this was right in the middle of Pixar’s legendary run in the 2000s, creating success after success, so it shouldn’t be surprising that some of those successes received accolades like Best Animated Feature (and Best Sound Editing).

It especially shouldn’t be surprising that The Incredibles, of all of Pixar’s successes, was named Best Animated Feature of 2004. Readers of Pixar Pints, The Low Major’s first film series, might remember that our combined ranking placed it as Pixar’s third best movie of all time, with four out of the five of us giving it a 10/10 rating.

I won’t spend too much time rehashing our thoughts, but The Incredibles is a movie that’s still worth watching nearly 20 years out from its original release date. It offers a well-paced story that was a unique departure from previous Pixar films in tone and theme.

Technically, it was also arguably the most impressive and groundbreaking CGI film released up to that point. Numerous technical challenges had to be overcome to bring the finished product to the screen. As Pixar’s first movie with an all-human cast, the team had to jump the unique hurdles of animating humans, including realistic hair and muscle movements. That’s not even getting into creating the special effects or the variety of locations within the movie. The Incredibles stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when the technical boundaries of animation are pushed past their previous limits.

With all that said, did the Academy overlook what other animated films brought to the table in 2004? What were the strengths and weaknesses of the other nominees, and is there a case that they may be more deserving than such an iconic film?

The Other Animated Features

Shark Tale — Nik

Nominated

I’ll be honest, I think I’m a bit scarred by Shark Tale.

You know how we all had that movie as a kid that we watched over and over? For me, it was Tarzan; for my brother, six years my junior, it was Shark Tale. As the youngest of three, when it came to keeping the peace, his decision on what to watch was usually favored, so I’m not kidding when I tell you I’ve watched this movie at least 30-40 times.

That history aside, I tried to go into this rewatch with an open mind, as it had been over 10 years since I watched the movie in full. Coincidentally, I had watched it with my girlfriend about six months ago, but we were watching mainly for the notorious shrimp monologue, and once that part had passed, it was mostly just background noise. For better or worse, this time around, I was focused on the entire movie.

Let’s just get that shrimp scene out of the way. If I had to give my rating on the movie from that scene alone, it’d be a 10/10. Yeah, it’s silly, but it actually does humanify even the smallest of sea creatures right away. Early on as a watcher, you realize everyone is just trying to make ends meet. Unfortunately, a single scene cannot define an animated movie—at least, not a movie like Shark Tale. I know I said I’d go into it with an open mind, but it doesn’t do itself any justice.

To start with, the premise of the film is ridiculous. Lenny, a shark whose dad is head of the mob, decides to be a vegetarian (how does this even make sense?). His brother gets fed up when he won’t eat the other main character, a small fish named Oscar. In the scuffle, a random anchor happens to fall and kill the brother. Lenny decides to run away and Oscar tells everyone he killed the shark. That may work, but when Lenny and Oscar reunite, Lenny decides to join in on the ruse! WTF?

Just imagine that in real life: your brother dies in an accident and a random passerby says, “yeah, I’ll take the credit for that”. I guarantee that not many brothers would respond, “yeah, I’ll back that”. But they easily distract the viewer by making Lenny look like a dolphin!

The film means well with its overall message: societal norms don’t always need to be conformed to. It’s okay to be yourself. But it’s hard not to take a step back and think about the situation. Lenny’s dad finally accepts his son for who he is: a vegetarian. That’s all well and good, but again, he helped a random fish pretend that he killed his brother, then hid this from his own dad. That doesn’t seem easily forgivable to me.

The animation in this movie isn’t great either, especially when compared to Finding Nemo, which released a year earlier. It’s just not as vibrant, and the character designs are kind of clunky.

All in all, Shark Tale just doesn’t compare to The Incredibles. In The Incredibles, the characters are more relatable, and the message is as well. Adults can watch The Incredibles and take something away from it. When watching Shark Tale, there is no angle for older audiences. It’s entertaining to children, but the true mark of a great animated movie—to me, at least—is that it holds up for all generations, and Shark Tale simply doesn’t.

Verdict: Not a better animated feature

Shrek 2 — Eli

Nominated

In 2001, Shrek became a cultural phenomenon and won Best Animated Feature. The sequel was going to contend for this award regardless of whether it actually deserved to. But you’ve seen this movie before. You know it lived up to the hype. In fact, some people even think Shrek 2 is superior to the original.

(It’s me. I’m some people.)

It’s not quite as iconic as the first film, but the arguments for it being a better movie are pretty clear. Most obviously, where Shrek seems somewhat confused on whether to promote the idea of being comfortable in your own skin or to make fun of people for their appearance, Shrek 2 peels back a few layers of the onion and shows how transparently problematic these beauty standards are in the first place. Today’s media landscape is much more welcoming to messages of body positivity, but back in 2004, I think you could reasonably call it a bold statement to relay this message without a hint of the irony that draped the original Shrek.

The series’ trademark crudity is also noticeably dialed back in the second film. Some vulgarity is still present—it wouldn’t be Shrek if it wasn’t—but it’s a lot less prominent and it feels more refined when it does show up. This is clearly for the better.

Last, but certainly not least, Shrek 2 marks the debut of Puss in Boots, whose energy balances the main cast in a way that the Shrek and Donkey pairing could never really do on their own in either film, at least in my opinion. It’s like when Frank Reynolds joined the Always Sunny gang.

But I’m not here to argue Shrek 2 over Shrek; I’m here to argue Shrek 2 over The Incredibles. And, for the first time in this series, I can confidently say that the movie I watched actually has a case.

For one, Shrek 2’s animation has aged a lot better. By 2004, Pixar was finally confident enough to make humans the stars of the show, but they were still cartoonishly disproportionate relative to what DreamWorks had going on, even within the context that the eponymous characters are superheroes. A lot of the sets from The Incredibles also look pretty unimpressive (bordering on amateur) today, while Shrek 2’s design pretty much all holds up.

Additionally, though not that this should matter: Shrek 2 was the first animated movie in the Best Animated Feature era (and the first since The Lion King in 1994) to be the highest grossing film of the year in which it was released. Grossing $928.8 million,¹ it crushed two other highly anticipated sequels—Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Spider-Man 2—by over $100 million, while The Incredibles placed fourth, trailing Shrek 2 by almost $300 million. Without adjusting for inflation, Shrek 2 was the highest grossing animated film of all time when it was released. It was a really big deal! The Incredibles was also a big deal, just…not to nearly the same extent.

But once you dig deeper than the surface, it’s clear that The Incredibles is the better movie. Despite being a more serious movie than its predecessor, Shrek 2 still doesn’t quite hold enough gravitas to mean as much to me as an adult as it did when I was six. There’s a certain Goldilocks level of equilibrium here that very few animated films have ever truly struck. Pixar managed to do it twice in a row, and it’s even better in The Incredibles than it was in Finding Nemo. It’s obvious why Pixar had such a sterling reputation at the time.

The main thing I gained from rewatching Shrek 2 as an adult was a reminder that they wrote a joke about the Big Bad Wolf being “gender confused”. The main thing I gained from rewatching The Incredibles as an adult was a renewed sense of love for my immediate family.

Verdict: Not a better animated feature

The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie — David

Snubbed

My family was never really a “movie” family the same way most were, so when I look back on my childhood, there are few titles that really stick out as films that we consistently came back to.

The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, however, was absolutely one of those.

We grew up without cable, so I had the distinction of being a “PBS Kid” for much of my life. Disney and Nickelodeon shows were special treats observed at friends’ houses or hotels when we traveled, piecemealing the cultural zeitgeist thirty minutes at a time—but then this movie arrived, and suddenly we had hours of SpongeBob at our fingertips. What a world.

It’s SpongeBob near the peak of the show—this was before the quality began to slide a little bit, back when the show was on that unbelievable run of heaters and Stephen Hillenburg still had the heaviest hand in control—and it shows throughout the film. The regular cast, supplemented by A-listers such as Alec Baldwin, Scarlett Johannsson, and Jeffrey Tambor, has all the same humor that made the show a worldwide hit, with a little extra flair befitting a TV show suddenly working on a movie budget.

The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie is far and away my favorite animated movie of 2004—in the aforementioned Pixar Pints review, I was the only person not to give The Incredibles a 10/10, and I stand by that rating—but it’s not the best movie.

Yes, there’s a lot of silly humor, and a surprising depth of heart beneath the quotable lines that still ping-pong around the family group chat, but it’s not a movie that’s going to hold weight beyond those sentimental connections formed as a kid. Objectively speaking, it’s not a better movie than The Incredibles—even if I’d personally rate it higher.

When considering films for this project, you have to be willing to set sentimentality aside, at least for a moment, and in doing so, I think it becomes clear that the correct film was given the award this year.

Verdict: Not a better animated feature

Running Tally

2001: 2 better (2 nominated; 3 snubbed)
2002: 1 better (4 nominated; 0 snubbed)
2003: 1 better (2 nominated; 2 snubbed)
2004: 0 better (2 nominated; 1 snubbed)
TOTAL: 4 better (10 nominated; 6 snubbed)

Join us in two weeks for a year of less iconic but still incredibly high quality films, as we compare 2005’s winner Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit to four other contenders!

Next: 2005 (2 nominated; 2 snubbed)

1. $1.697 billion in 2024 dollars