Better Animated Feature: 2005

The One With No 3D

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Leah: This might be the strongest slate of Best Animated Feature nominees we’ve seen yet: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Corpse Bride, and Howl’s Moving Castle. None of these films are notably bad, which we’ve observed is not always the case.

Also, can you believe we got a year without a Disney or Pixar film nominated? This is the first year that happened, and it’s only happened one other time since (2011). Granted, Pixar didn’t release a film in 2005, and Disney was having its mid-aughts identity crisis (they released the infamous Chicken Little this year).

This goes a long way toward explaining why 2005 was the first—and, to date, only—year without a 3D computer-animated nominee. The animation industry was trending toward that technique for feature films throughout the aughts, so it’s notable that nothing in that style released this year made the cut, and instead films with stop-motion and traditional hand-drawn animation got recognition for their cinematic achievements. Of course, the computer-animated stuff is still what we were watching as kids, so we also decided to revisit a couple of the year’s 3D offerings: Madagascar and Robots.

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit ended up victorious, but was it truly the best animated movie of the year? Did Corpse Bride, Howl’s Moving Castle, or even Madagascar or Robots have something more to offer that went unrecognized?

The Nominees

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (won Best Animated Feature)
Corpse Bride (nominated)
Howl’s Moving Castle (nominated)
Madagascar (snubbed)
Robots (snubbed)

The “Best” Animated Feature: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Leah: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the first stop-motion film to win Best Animated Feature, wasn’t the first entry in Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit franchise, but it was the first feature-length film. I had never seen anything from the franchise before I watched The Curse of the Were-Rabbit for this project, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect.

What I got was a well-crafted and astute film that used its distinct style to tell a good story. The movie follows the title characters as they embark on a journey to protect their town from pests humanely. Unfortunately, that task becomes a bit more difficult when the pest turns out to be a Were-Rabbit.

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is incredibly clever visually. For instance, a record titled The Plants Suite appeared in the garden while “Venus, the Bringer of Peace” (of Holst’s The Planets Suite) played in the background. I’m still not over Waiting for Gouda on Wallace’s bookshelf, where every title was a cheese-based pun on a notable work of literature. This visual humor even extends to the concept of the film itself, as it subverts the horror aesthetic by essentially being about a giant rabbit terrorizing vegetables.

The stop-motion in this film is truly impressive. A lot of detail went into making the models, positioning them in such a way to make the animation come to life, and adding special effects for that extra visual complexity. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit has a distinct style in its character and set design and I don’t think anyone could say that it’s not an achievement.

One criticism I’d note is that the romantic subplot between Wallace, Victor, and Lady Tottington (Totty for short) felt outdated. It’s pretty cliché to watch two men fight over a woman, especially when the fight is a metaphor for the differing ideologies the men have and Totty is merely the prize for the one that succeeds: Victor’s bloodthirsty hunter approach or Wallace’s humane one (gee, I wonder which one the movie wants us to sympathize with).

Unfortunately, Gromit is cursed with an affliction that plagues many cartoon dogs: he’s doomed to be smarter than all of the humans that exist in his universe. Of course, that does make him quite fun to watch. As a silent character, his thoughts and feelings are conveyed visually. Gromit’s expressions were super impressive, as was the clarity of his character arc. Easily the best character in the movie.

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was obviously worthy of recognition and praise. But was it really the best animated movie of 2005?

The Other Animated Features

Corpse Bride — Preston

Nominated

The guiding star for my approach to reviewing media (typically music and film) is its ability to live up to the best possible version of itself. It’s important to keep that standard in the back of your head when looking at Corpse Bride and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, two films whose similarities end at the release year (2005), the medium (stop-motion animation), and the voice actress for the female lead (Helena Bonham Carter) involved in a weird love triangle that includes a guy named Victor.

The former is a Tim Burton gothic horror that, while featuring comedy, always takes its world quite seriously; the latter is a pastiche of schlock horror which is much more eager to lean on the fourth wall and exaggerate its cartoonish elements. The former is carried by the strength of its plot at the cost of some character depth and emotional weight; the latter is carried by the strength of two spectacularly good protagonists at the cost of its plot being rather contrived and not always making a whole lot of sense.

Let’s start there, with Corpse Bride’s plot. It’s honestly a bit of a mess, and it’s fascinating to think about how much this film gets away with on the strength of its best elements. There are a lot of miscommunications that happen to make the movie’s story work, and while the characters being separated so much allows that to feel less forced, the scenes they do spend actually talking often have you wishing they would just say what they mean. (The other reason these miscommunication plots sort of still work is because perhaps the biggest one, which drives most of the third act, is a clear homage to Romeo and Juliet that works within the film’s core themes.)

The pacing is also a problem; what would typically be the first act takes up the entire first half of the movie because there’s a lot to set up and the runtimes typically allotted to animated films in the 2000s weren’t really equipped to handle it.

These elements are smoothed over by the film’s best attribute, and the thing that makes me prefer it over The Curse of the Were-Rabbit despite that movie having a much tighter plot with a better-defined internal logic: the main characters. Corpse Bride has a lot of one-note side characters who exist to be one thing (usually funny, sometimes menacing), and even its second female lead is pretty underdeveloped, but the dynamic between Victor and Emily—the eponymous corpse bride—is fantastically rich. It’s rare for a film to strike the balance of presenting two sympathetic characters with directly conflicting motivations and get the audience rooting for both of them, and even rarer for the ending not to feel like a slight to one of their arcs or a complete cop-out.

Corpse Bride achieves this by telling a rather fascinating narrative about unrequited love, which is in itself a difficult balancing act. It’s remarkable that Emily’s insistent pursuit of Victor manages to serve as the core antagonistic force of the entire plot yet still doesn’t come across as harassment or manipulative behavior. At the risk of spoiling the message of the ending, if not necessarily what it means for the plot, the conclusion of this character arc feels like a direct rebuttal to the presumption within Hollywood that fulfillment and love are necessarily equivalent and you can’t have one without the other.

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a lovely little film, and it’s worth watching simply for the care Aardman put into what could’ve easily been a much more aimless and lifeless story, but it also falls short of what it could be. There’s room for more emotional heart and uncertainty to its story—nothing as poignant or complex as Corpse Bride, but something more than the brief suggestion of internal conflict that gets set up by the film’s own miscommunication plot, then dropped immediately when that thread gets resolved.

Corpse Bride isn’t perfect in its own right, but it feels like a story more worthy of being told in the feature-length format, given the proper space to explore its nuance and make a point that you’ll be thinking about for a while after its final scene.

Verdict: Better Animated Feature

Howl’s Moving Castle — Leah

Nominated

As The Low Major’s resident Ghibli superfan, of course I wanted the chance to make the case for a movie I called a “cinematic masterpiece” (and consider my second favorite from the studio).

So what’s so great about Howl’s Moving Castle and why might it have deserved this win over The Curse of the Were-Rabbit?

The movie follows Sophie, a young woman who’s cursed by a witch to become old. In her quest to undo the curse, she ends up at Howl’s moving castle and makes a deal with Calcifer, the fire demon with the magic that actually makes the castle move: if she can break his curse, he’ll break hers. Sophie gets caught up in Howl’s problems while inserting herself as his new cleaning lady. At the heart of the movie is the journey of growth both Howl and Sophie take. Dealing with a witch’s curse, navigating their homeland entering into a pointless war, and even navigating their relationship with each other.

Howl’s Moving Castle is a truly gorgeous movie. So many of the backgrounds capture the beauty of nature, like tranquility sitting by a lake or the pleasure of visiting a field of flowers. But that’s not all there is to it. Miyazaki’s love of planes shines through in this movie, with lots of great aircraft designs. And, of course, the star of the show mechanically is the titular moving castle. My words won’t do it justice but it’s a very creative aspect of the film. I love the way it’s animated and designed like a mechanical creature.

I also need to commend Joe Hisaishi’s gorgeous score. Music does a lot to contribute to the atmosphere of a movie, and the soundtrack here highlights the film’s emotional weight. It’s essential to helping build the desired tone and atmosphere.

Though Howl’s Moving Castle is pretty obviously an anti-war movie, it can be easy to miss that the war in the movie was meant as a commentary as on the Iraq War. In the book the movie was based on, the war wasn’t a plot element. Hayao Miyazaki adapted the book in such a way that the anti-war commentary could be added. But it’s not a preachy film; it gets its themes across without browbeating the viewer with a particular message.

I think what pushes Howl’s Moving Castle to the top for me is its engrossing story combined with the artistic mastery of 2D animation (and cinema in general). It’s a beautiful movie to look at, listen to, and take in. Its message was poignant during the 2000s and it’s still poignant now, as we continue to live in a world of unjust wars. It’s well crafted and meaningful, and I can’t really ask for more than that.

The Curse of the Were Rabbit also told a good story and showed a mastery of its craft, but it just didn’t grip me quite like Howl’s Moving Castle. The art style didn’t quite reach its beauty, the story didn’t quite capture my imagination in the same way, and it just plain didn’t mean as much to me.

Deciding between these two requires a degree of subjectivity because I do think they’re both good movies, but Howl’s Moving Castle is definitely the type of good move I’m more excited to see.

Verdict: Better Animated Feature

Madagascar — Eli

Snubbed

I’m kinda torn on this one. In my defense, so were the critics.

Bad news first: this is formulaic DreamWorks to a T. Most of their catalog in this era comprised fairly barebones 3D animation telling a story about nothing with an all-star voice cast and a heavily licensed soundtrack. Let’s go point-by-point down that list.

• With Madagascar, DreamWorks’ design and animation haven’t markedly improved since Shrek, which released four years earlier, and in some ways (notably set design), they’ve gotten actively worse.

• The plot of Madagascar is entirely unimportant. There’s pretty much no character development in the entire movie. The conflict resolves itself; the climax just kinda comes out of nowhere and when it’s over, you’re like, “oh, huh, I guess that’s the end”.

• The voice cast here: Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Sacha Baron Cohen, Cedric the Entertainer, Andy Richter. None of these performances are awful, per se,¹ but you can clearly tell these people are not specialized voice actors.

• Licensed tracks include “What a Wonderful World”, “Stayin’ Alive”, “Boogie Wonderland”, and character renditions of “New York, New York” and, of course, “I Like to Move It”.

And yet…despite all this…I was surprised at how much I still liked this film as an adult. Some part of me cannot physically remove the rose-colored glasses through which I view this film based on so many rewatches as a kid, but even divorced from that, the zany energy and iconic scenes in Madagascar really hold up. It doesn’t surprise me that the movie didn’t get a BAF nomination but it also doesn’t surprise me that it was the highest grossing animated film of 2005 by a mile and spawned an extremely successful franchise.²

It’s honestly kinda hard to compare this to The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, an animated film that actually wants to be about something and display some mastery of the art form.

I can start with the obvious: both movies were scored by Hans Zimmer. While his Madagascar score is fairly uninspiring and generally falls to the background in favor of the pop soundtrack, his work on The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is required to be a lot more prominent (and, frankly, better) given that one of the main characters is nonverbal.

Gromit’s lack of speech accentuates his wonderful animation, which serves as the centerpiece of this impressive stop-motion effort. Compared to Madagascar, where the animation is mediocre and there’s probably way too much talking, the difference is night and day.

Additionally, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit tells a real story with layered meanings; my main takeaway was an allegory for religious guilt. That said, the primary B-plot of Wallace trying to mack Totty seems pretty dated to me two decades later and was kind of a slog to watch unfold. Add in the general lack of noteworthy characters and the film’s rather grim styling and it’s pretty obvious that Madagascar is the more fun film to watch.

Were I to rate each film on a 10-point scale, I would give both of them a 9/10. I think that’s pretty much the critical consensus for The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, while Madagascar was polarizing even among respected critics, with some feeling the way I do and others seeing the movie’s obvious failings as unforgivable (which, to be clear, is more than fair).

However, not all 9/10s are created equal. I rate Madagascar that way because it’s just an hour and a half of pure fun and good vibes. I rate The Curse of the Were-Rabbit that way because it’s a spectacular movie that deserved to win awards.

Verdict: Not a better animated feature

Robots — Preston

Snubbed

If Corpse Bride is a film that sets a high ceiling for itself and hits the occasional rough patch in pursuing it, Blue Sky’s Robots is a film that sets a high ceiling for itself and spends much of its runtime floundering on its extremely low floor. It’s a shame because the potential of this story is genuinely very interesting…it just feels like it was put to paper by somebody who had never written a screenplay before.

Not all of this movie’s faults lie with the writing—there’s a lot of blame to throw around for its failure to live up to the wondrous world it promises (including with animation that’s genuinely very impressive for its era). The dialogue isn’t helped at all by halfhearted voice acting, with Ewan McGregor’s Rodney, Halle Berry’s Cappy, and Amanda Bynes’ Piper particularly failing to sell their characters.

The movie is also plagued by missing or weirdly framed shots that struggle to tell the story in a way that doesn’t feel painfully clunky. Scenes start and end without much coherence, muddying the timeline and stakes of the film and leaving it unable to pick up any real emotional throughline until the third act.

The broader shape of the story, though, would take a lot to lift beyond mediocrity. It’s such a tried-and-true coming-of-age narrative that it should be easy to fill in the blanks, yet the whole thing ends up bizarrely paced and struggles to hold onto any plot points until hitting that third act. The story can’t make up its mind about whether Rodney is determined to set things right or constantly on the verge of giving up, and it’s incredibly quick to handwave anything it’s introduced that becomes inconvenient for even a single moment.

That’s not even going into how poorly Robots has aged. The “humor” reliably belittles minorities and undercuts its message of inclusivity in ways that make Shrek look good, and every last female character (all five!) exists largely to be a love interest or other motivating factor for a male character.³

Cappy, ostensibly the female lead, gets barely any screen time and is thrown together with Rodney in the “what, aren’t you two a couple?” gag popular in animated films of this era—which feels as uncomfortable as ever, of course, but also just doesn’t make sense because they’ve spent maybe an hour of in-universe time together when this happens and have no chemistry. At least some of the movies we’ve looked at for this project can try to defend their problematic aspects on the grounds that they would’ve been well received at the time, but I can’t imagine any point in film history when these parts of Robots would’ve even worked logically as jokes or plot points, let alone ones handled with any grace whatsoever.

The message this movie is trying to convey is a good one—“you can shine no matter what you’re made of”, as Bigweld tells us in the opening act—but it’s been done much better, many times over. Robots might’ve had incredible potential, but far too little of this film holds up to any scrutiny for it to merit any comparison to 2005’s far more deserving BAF winner and nominees.

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)
2005: 2 better (2 nominated; 2 snubbed)
TOTAL: 6 better (12 nominated; 8 snubbed)

I sure hope you liked 2005’s slate, because 2006’s is all the way on the other end of the spectrum. It’s bad—real bad. Join us in two weeks if you dare.

Next: 2006 (2 nominated; 2 snubbed)

1. Schwimmer’s is the weakest.

2. The Penguins of Madagascar was an underrated show and I could probably stand to rewatch it soon.

3. The movie isn’t shy about this, either—none of them make it out of their introductory scene without being firmly assigned a love interest. At least Madame Gasket’s husband is only there for a few one-off jokes and might as well not exist…which leaves her to spend most of the film as a catalyst for the main villain.