Better Animated Feature: 2006
Eli rants about Happy Feet and Leah rants about Monster House. Strap in.
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Eli: Put lightly, 2006 was a down year for animation.
The IMDb scores for this year’s Best Animated Feature nominees are…bleak. The winner, Happy Feet, currently sports a 6.4: the lowest score of any BAF winner by a wide margin.1 The other nominees, Cars and Monster House, sit at 7.2 and 6.6, respectively. For comparison, all three of 2005’s nominees have a higher IMDb score than Cars.2
And the year wasn’t exactly full of hidden gems either. Here’s every other Best Animated Feature submission from 2006 (IMDb scores in parentheses):
The Ant Bully (5.8)
Barnyard (5.6)3
Curious George (6.5)
Everyone’s Hero (5.7)
Flushed Away (6.6)
Ice Age: The Meltdown (6.8)
Open Season (6.1)
Over the Hedge (6.7)
Paprika (7.7)
Renaissance (6.6)
A Scanner Darkly (7.0)
The Wild (5.2)4
Only two other movies in the 7s: the R-rated anime that received almost no theatrical release outside of Japan, and the R-rated, rotoscoped sci-fi based on a Philip K. Dick novel. We’ll cover both of those in this piece, but for American children in ‘06 (like me, who turned 9 that November), the animation landscape was barren.
Be that as it may, one of the tumbleweeds still had to win Best Animated Feature. Let’s determine if they picked the right one.
The Nominees
Happy Feet (won Best Animated Feature)
Cars (nominated)
Monster House (nominated)
Paprika (snubbed)
A Scanner Darkly (snubbed)
The “Best” Animated Feature: Happy Feet
Leah: This might be the most controversial win in the history of the Best Animated Feature category.5 While doing research on Happy Feet, I found this Cartoon Brew opinion piece about its Oscar win, lamenting motion capture replacing the traditional craft of animation. Motion capture animation had a lot of buzz in the aughts, though in hindsight we can see that it didn’t catch on for feature-length animation as was hoped (or feared, depending on your perspective).
The art style of Happy Feet is unique among what we’ve seen so far for this project. It leans very heavily into a photorealistic depiction of the characters; the animals in this movie look like real animals, which is visually impressive. Thinking of the larger implications, being able to depict creatures so realistically is an achievement for animation. Love it or hate it, this film is unlike any animated movie before it, and it opens up a path for future animations.
On a personal note, I don’t think I’ve seen a motion capture film that looks better than this6 (and especially not a 2006 motion capture Oscar nominee—more on that later).
While the realism of the movie is a big strength, for all the novelty, I do think the style has one big issue that’s difficult to ignore: the character designs aren’t distinct. All animals of the same species look too similar to each other (except for Mumble, the main character).
And to be fair, that’s how it would be in real life—penguins do look pretty similar with minor differences—but in cartoons, there’s a reason that giving each character a distinct silhouette is a best practice. While watching the movie, I’d sometimes mix up Mumble’s mother and his love interest because they looked so similar, which isn’t a problem I normally have while watching an Oscar-winning film.
Realism isn’t what people usually come to animated movies for, which I think led to some of the criticism of this film. Being able to achieve it is technically impressive, but it also limits the unreal aspects of cartoons that make them so fun.
Overall, Happy Feet had a distinct concept that probably won’t work for everyone. Penguins dancing like people is a fun idea, but some might prefer their penguin dances to be more stylized and less human-like.7 As a film, it showed an innovative technique for the medium of animation, but the reception of its implementation was mixed. With such a controversial win, could either of the other nominees be more deserving?
Eli: I can answer that question: yes! Yes they could. Because Happy Feet is not a good movie.
In fact, I’d say it’s a brutal watch. The theme changes seemingly once every five minutes and none of them work.
It starts out as a movie about learning to overcome disability. True to life, penguins in this universe mate through song, but Mumble has a rather poor singing voice and the musical part of his brain instead manifests through dance. They could have spun this into a tale about Mumble finding his way through life while coping with his disability, but instead…his disability ends up saving his entire community. Because we’ve never had enough portrayals of disability that pretend it’s a secret superpower, have we?
Just a few minutes into the runtime, child Mumble is nearly eaten by a group of skuas, one of which has a tag around its leg. The movie uses this as a plot device to discuss general othering and isolation, which affects Mumble, as he fears his disability will make him an outcast among society—a fear that is later upheld by the elder leader of his community. Except no, this thread gets cut as well. Because Gloria, the most popular girl in the waddle, is randomly into Mumble for no apparent reason. Good for Mumble but, y’know, so much for othering.
Speaking of that elder leader, he’s clearly supposed to be some sort of stand-in for overbearing theocrats everywhere. The way he’s written leads you into thinking leadership like this is bad and wrong. And I sure think it’s wrong—I don’t need the movie’s help with that—but Happy Feet fails to land a clean blow against it, never following through on the moral. After the elder is proven wrong, he’s never punished for his gross mishandling of the situation, for exiling Mumble for the grave sin of being different. He doesn’t lose any influence in the community at all. He just smiles and dances like it’s the best day of his life. It’s pathetic.
But most obviously, what Happy Feet wants to be is an environmental message movie. Human inventions interfere with penguin life in Antarctica on an everyday basis, and humans overfishing the Southern Ocean leaves the penguins with nothing to eat. It’s so heavy-handed that it flies far beyond coming off as preachy and lands all the way at beating you over the head with a stick.
And yet, the environmental plotline is so underdeveloped that it legitimately just resolves itself. Mumble tries and fails to catch a fishing boat and somehow winds up at SeaWorld? In Orlando?? Like 8000 miles from the South Pole??? There, humans see him dancing and…magically understand that this means they should return him to his home in Antarctica and stop fishing his community to starvation. So they take him back to his home continent and ban human fishing in the region. Problem solved automatically. It’s nonsense.
Director George Miller is on the record saying Happy Feet wasn’t originally supposed to be an environmental movie, noting that he decided to add this message late in production because, “you can’t tell a story about Antarctica and the penguins without giving that dimension”. This surprises me absolutely zero because boy is it easy to tell this plotline was not thought through in the slightest.
I’m not even gonna touch on all the white actors voicing characters who are clearly not supposed to be white, or the overabundance of scenes that are just Mumble dancing for way too long to remain interesting. It’s a slog to sit through.
But, if I can give Happy Feet one thing: Leah’s right; the movie looks amazing. It nails the aesthetic of Antarctica. At least I think it does—I’ve never been to Antarctica—but Happy Feet is genuinely pretty to look at, making the continent come alive. They did it more favors than Ice Age did four years earlier; that’s for sure.
A good aesthetic can bring a movie a long way. Nine years after Happy Feet, the same quality would save Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur from unmitigated disaster. In the end, though, both movies put lipstick on a pig.
Perhaps sometimes that’s enough to win an Oscar. Animation has certainly had its up and down years. Best Animated Feature had five nominees in 2015 and The Good Dinosaur thankfully wasn’t one of them, but it only had three nominees in ‘06 and Happy Feet was evidently the best. Maybe this was just a really bad year for animated movies and Happy Feet truly did deserve the award?
Let’s find out.
The Other Animated Features
Cars — Eli
Nominated
Cars is a bit of a paradox: it’s easily among Pixar’s most famous and widely beloved films, but it’s also the effort that made it clear that the studio was fallible.
We first wrote about Cars on this site two years ago for Pixar Pints, our retrospective series on every Pixar feature film. That viewing was my first as an adult, and my take on the movie then was that a) much of it doesn’t hold up through adult eyes, and b) chronologically, this is the first Pixar film this is true of.8
In this regard, the scene that stuck out to me the most on this latest rewatch was the one in which Lightning and Mater go tractor tipping. The purpose of this scene is obviously to develop the two’s budding friendship, which is an important part of Lightning’s character arc, but why this specific activity? Why this silly joke with no real payoff rather than something more heartfelt or even plot-relevant?
The answer, of course, is that the creative team wanted Larry the Cable Guy to do a funny. Which is fine…in an animated movie aimed specifically at kids. But that hadn’t historically been Pixar’s MO!
In many ways, Cars parses more as a DreamWorks affair than a Pixar film. This is surely not an original critique, but the more juvenile humor, the glossy and overly vivid aesthetic, and—most of all—the in-your-face, licensed, popular music soundtrack were heavily associated with DreamWorks at the time.
However, while Cars is certainly Pixar’s DreamWorksiest product, I wouldn’t go as far as saying DreamWorks could have made this. At the time Cars released, DreamWorks’ three most recent 3D-animated films were Shark Tale, Madagascar, and Over the Hedge, none of which really told a compelling story or had meaningful character development.9 Cars does both, and it does both very well.
I think a lot of the nitty gritty aspects of Cars’ plot are complete nonsense but, when bolted together, they become greater than the sum of their parts. Very few films bottle up the pure essence of nostalgia as well as Cars. And, though I maintain that this movie fails to appeal to the average adult as much as most of Pixar’s filmography, there’s something to be said about the story of Doc Hudson. In a movie so focused on reliving the past, Doc has to learn to cope with the trauma his past causes him, eventually redirecting that energy toward helping Lightning avoid a similar fate. It’s not quite the universal moral we’d come to expect from Pixar by ‘06, but it’s still unmistakably Pixar.
Cars isn’t a great movie, but it’s at least a good one. That’s more than enough to put it above Happy Feet, a movie that looks prettier than Cars but is otherwise markedly worse in every single way. I feel dirty saying this given I’m advocating for the Pixar Death Star over Animal Logic, a studio that has received one Oscar nomination in any category ever, but you don’t need headlights to see that Cars was robbed here.
Verdict: Better Animated Feature
Monster House — Leah
Nominated
Sometimes, trying something new doesn’t actually pay off.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it: this is not a Better Animated Feature. This is not a Good Animated Feature. This is not an animated feature I would recommend to anyone.
My first grievance is that everyone in this movie is annoying and unlikeable. The main character DJ is boring, and weird about his friend Jenny. Chowder is the annoying best friend and is also weird about Jenny. (Watching two 12-year-olds argue about calling dibs on a girl is less entertaining than watching grass grow while Iowa football is playing.) Jenny herself is stuck-up. Zee is a terrible babysitter. Bones is the kind of teenager who bullies a 12-year-old.10 DJ’s parents suck. The cops are power-tripping idiots. The titular house terrorizes the local children. Nebbercracker is the curmudgeonly old man, introduced almost like a horror movie monster, and is also definitely the most likeable person in this movie.
This pure lack of personality appeal is not helped by the incredibly ugly character designs. Animation is at its best when the characters are stylized to be visually appealing and expressive. The motion capture technology of this movie excels at making characters that move like humans, but it also pigeonholes them straight into the uncanny valley. The movie exaggerates proportions a little bit, but not enough to create something distinct or appealing. Instead, we get a kid with a way too big head for a person and eyes way too small for a cartoon character. Worst of both worlds.
And despite realism being a virtue of motion capture, the movement in the movie still occasionally misses the mark. During some of the action scenes, the kids jumping around reminded me of the weightlessness I might have seen in a video game character on my GameCube. That doesn’t look real; it just looks odd.
I think this story is about letting go of the past and moving on from tragedy, while also embracing the joys of childhood. But consider: I Do Not Care. I’ll level with y’all; this movie did not move me. I hated looking at these characters. I hated listening to them. Why would I care about their story?
While it’s debatable how well the style of Happy Feet worked, at least it looked good. The photorealism was impressive and the animals weren’t ugly. And that story made me care about the characters and think about societal issues. I won’t sit here and tell y’all it was a crowning achievement of cinema or anything, but it was at least a cute, fun movie. Having some redeeming qualities is enough to put Happy Feet over Monster House, whether or not you agree Happy Feet deserved the win.
Monster House dropped the bar to the floor for me. This is the worst movie I’ve had to watch for this project, and I’d like to remind the audience that Eli made me sit through Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius with them. I’m convinced literally any other nominee from any other year would be better than this movie (feel free to argue with me in the comments if you can think of something worse).
Please don’t make me do the angry reviewer bit again, I beg.
Verdict: Not a better animated feature
Paprika — Eli
Snubbed
I didn’t originally plan on doing this. This was supposed to be a quickie, relatively speaking: Happy Feet, Cars, Monster House, done. The whole thing was written, and then as I was reading it over, I thought…man, this stinks.
Not our writing, of course—I’m not that self-deprecative—but the slate of movies we covered this year. We know this year’s best animated film wasn’t the poorly conceived, questionably animated complement to An Inconvenient Truth in which Robin Williams voices both a Hispanic penguin and a Black penguin. But surely it also wasn’t Pixar’s flimsiest film from their classic era, a movie infamous for being too juvenile for most adults.
And so, in our search for true, animated nourishment, I made a last-minute decision to sprinkle some Paprika onto this piece.
I came into Satoshi Kon’s Paprika more or less blind; I looked up the premise of the movie, nothing more.11 I had no idea what to expect, but as soon as the title sequence started, all I could think was, “finally, some good fucking food”.
Unlike any of 2006’s popular animated movies stateside, Paprika is a true sensory experience.
Visually, it’s amazing: its plot concerning the uncontrolled blending of dreams with reality, this movie mashes the grounded and the surreal in a way that can only truly be done through top-tier animation. One minute, you’re listening in on a mundane conversation between two scientists in a boardroom; the next, anthropomorphic household appliances are leading a parade of brass-playing amphibians through the middle of a crowded city.
The soundtrack and score are incredible. From Paprika’s theme in the above intro to the distorted circus music in the parade sequences and a number I can only describe as “boss music” in the chase and fight scenes, every note in this movie pulls you in, immerses you, makes you feel like the dreams are entering your own reality. Susumu Hirasawa’s work on this movie is among the very best musical accompaniment I’ve heard in any animated film.
The plot of Paprika is riddled with somewhat nonsensical threads that spiral all over the place, and the final resolution—while I understand the logic behind it—is questionable. If you prefer your media to tell a clean story, look elsewhere. But that’s also true of Happy Feet, so if I’m directly comparing the two movies, I can’t really dock Paprika for this.
Considering the two films holistically, Paprika is very obviously the better movie. It’s everything I love about the medium allowed to run awry and descend into chaos. I’d even say it’s better than Cars.
As long as animation has the stigma of being primarily for kids, movies like Paprika will never have a shot at Best Animated Feature. It took until 2023 for a movie rated higher than PG to win this award, and that movie—Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron—is only rated PG-13 and still features a child protagonist. Released 17 years earlier, Paprika is an undeniably adult story that’s rated R and includes animated nudity and even a psychedelic depiction of sexual assault.
Asking the Academy to give or even nominate Paprika for this award would be an uphill battle today, let alone in 2006. But if the criteria is simply “the best animated film”—which it is—Paprika fits far better than anything else we’ve discussed so far today.
Verdict: Better Animated Feature
A Scanner Darkly — Leah
Snubbed
This was the movie I originally wanted to review for this year, but someone had to watch Monster House.
However, since Eli decided to give Paprika a shot after the dismal offerings of the ‘06 nominees, I decided I also wanted to watch a good movie. And after watching this, I can confidently say that this movie should have been nominated. It has a coherent story, a unique (and appealing) visual style, intriguing characters, and—most importantly—upon finishing it, I did not feel compelled to write a list of grievances.
A Scanner Darkly is a rotoscoped film directed by Richard Linklater, adapted from the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name. You may remember Linklater as the director of 2001’s Waking Life, the other rotoscoped film we’ve covered for BAF.12
The movie follows an undercover cop assuming the identity of Bob Arctor in order to infiltrate the supply chain for Substance D, an addictive drug that has reached a concerning level of use in the United States. The movie takes the themes of drug use and addiction very seriously, showing us how they impact the lives of these characters and how the world and systems around them shape their relationships to Substance D. It’s a very thoughtful movie that respectfully explores the impact of substance use.
The rotoscoped visuals are striking. The “scramble suits” the officers wear to keep their identities hidden from even each other are a great example of the film’s creativity.
The hallucinations induced by drugs also benefit from the movie’s animation style, allowing the more unrealistic aspects to be portrayed in a way that still fits with the environment.
I really enjoyed the acting in this film. Keanu Reeves does an excellent job making Bob Arctor feel real, showing the internal conflict that arises from being undercover and having a double identity. Winona Ryder also gave a fantastic performance as Donna Hawthorne. And the rotoscoped visuals gave the movie a distinct style while still showcasing how the actors brought these characters to life.
Obviously, this is a very different kind of movie from Happy Feet, but I still feel confident saying this is the better film. Happy Feet feels jumbled, lacking the same thematic focus as A Scanner Darkly. Eli and I have already discussed the problems with Happy Feet at length, so suffice it to say that A Scanner Darkly’s flaws are nowhere near as egregious. I cared more about its characters and story.
I’d highly recommend watching A Scanner Darkly if you haven’t—though, be warned: it does cover heavy subject matters. In a just world, this would have gotten the nomination over Monster House and the win over Happy Feet.
Verdict: 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)
2006: 3 better (2 nominated; 2 snubbed)
TOTAL: 9 better (14 nominated; 10 snubbed)
Join us in two weeks when we compare the best of 2007 against Ratatouille, a movie longtime readers already know I don’t like.
Next: 2007 (2 nominated; 1 snubbed)
2012’s Brave is second worst, all the way up at 7.1.
Winner Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (7.5) and nominees Corpse Bride (7.4) and Howl’s Moving Castle (8.2)
We aren’t covering Barnyard in this piece, but if you showed me this bulleted list back in ‘06 and asked me to pick one for movie night, I would have selected Barnyard without thinking about it for more than two seconds. I loved that movie and the corresponding video game, which I logged probably a hundred hours in on the GameCube. I was lukewarm on the animated series.
If you count this as a Disney movie (Disney produced it but outsourced the animation, which is rare for them), it may very well be the worst Disney animated movie that isn’t a direct-to-video sequel.
The next year, Pixar would even take a shot at it in the credits of Ratatouille.
Editor’s note: clearly Leah hasn’t played any of the NBA 2K My Career modes. –Eli
Here’s my favorite example of a cute, unrealistic animated penguin dancing.
Discounting A Bug’s Life, a film I had never seen as a kid, rendering the comparison impossible
2007’s Bee Movie would continue this trend. 2008’s Kung Fu Panda would break it.
Editor’s note: The ever-reliable “Monster House Wiki” informs me that Bones is actually 30. I’m not sure where they got this information, and it’s been ages since I myself have seen this movie, so I don’t know if it’s correct, but if it is…lol. –Eli
We also covered Kon’s 2003 film Tokyo Godfathers for BAF. The order I watched these films in real time was actually Paprika first and Tokyo Godfathers second, so I went into Paprika knowing nothing about Kon as a director. It’s a shame he’s gone; Paprika was the last feature film he released before his too-early death in 2010 at age 46.
Now is probably a good time to warn you that Alex Jones has a cameo in this film too. (Editor’s note: If I had a nickel for every Richard Linklater rotoscoped film with an Alex Jones cameo that was snubbed from a Best Animated Feature nomination… –Eli)
I've actually never played NBA 2K at all, career mode or not.