Better Animated Feature: 2013

Frozen certainly wins Most Popular Animated Feature. But was it truly the best?

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Eli: Yeah, so Frozen pretty much ruled the world.

Big-time American animation kind of stalled for most of this year. Pixar released a movie, but it was Monsters University, so they might as well have released nothing at all. DreamWorks released two movies and neither of them were any good (but if one of them had to be nominated for Best Animated Feature, I guess I’m at least glad it was The Croods and not Turbo).

Through the first 11 months of the year, the most successful animated movie was Illumination’s strongly anticipated Despicable Me 2, which…well, you know how I feel about Illumination. Then, on November 27,¹ Walt Disney Animation changed everything with the release of Frozen, which rocketed well past a $1 billion gross at the box office to become, at the time, the most successful animated movie ever.

If you’re old enough to read this without parental supervision, you were around when Frozen came out, so I don’t need to explain its ubiquity to you. All I’ll say is that I was a high school choir and theater kid and not a day went by for the rest of the school year without some rendition of “Let It Go” or “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?”. Over a decade later, not a karaoke night goes by without the same fate.

So yeah, Frozen had the American market pretty much cornered. Internationally, The Wind Rises became Studio Ghibli’s first nominee in eight years, while France’s Ernest & Celestine received nearly universal acclaim. Did either of them stack up to Frozen? And hey, Frozen being absurdly popular doesn’t necessarily require it to be actually good, so did either of the other American nominees have what it takes to dethrone the Snow Queen?

Let’s find out.

The Nominees

Frozen (won Best Animated Feature)
The Croods (nominated)
Despicable Me 2 (nominated)
Ernest & Celestine (nominated)
The Wind Rises (nominated)

The “Best” Animated Feature: Frozen

Leah: Frozen is a hard movie to introduce, because what could I say that our dear readers haven’t heard before? Frozen was one of the most financially successful animated movies of all time. In fact, none of the other Best Animated Feature Oscar winners have been able to surpass its worldwide gross (maybe Inside Out 2 will challenge that at this year’s awards show). It was impossible to escape this pop culture phenomenon around the holidays of 2013. The most iconic musical number “Let It Go” was playing everywhere, causing a not insignificant portion of people to get sick of the song and the movie through overexposure.

With all this success, surely this movie did something special to earn that attention and eventually this award? To give a basic synopsis, Frozen follows the story of sisters Elsa and Ana, princesses of Arendelle. Elsa has secret snow magic that her parents encouraged her to hide, to the point that no one—not even Ana—knows about it. Instead, she comes across as reclusive and cold, withdrawing from the world for fear of harming someone with her magic. This is not meant to last, as the death of their parents means that Elsa needs to take the throne when she comes of age at 21, opening up the castle for the coronation ceremony. Elsa’s lack of control over her powers inevitably results in her secret being revealed, causing her to run away and plunging Arendelle into an eternal winter.² Ana, finally understanding her sister’s reclusiveness, goes on a journey to find her and get her to bring back summer, meeting several new friends along the way.

Disney creates this narrative with a high level of artistry. At this point, they’d transitioned fully into the CGI era of their studio. Frozen offers gorgeous wintery landscapes to admire throughout the journey, using the snowy setting to add atmosphere and establish the tone of the movie. The characters’ designs are standard for Disney: pretty princesses, cute sidekicks, a handsome prince, a weaselly duke. They have a lot of personality while maintaining the stylistic conventions associated with the Disney brand. Frozen delivers the level of quality we’ve all come to expect from Disney, pushing forward with more and more impressive CGI.

The artistry doesn’t stop with the visuals; in my opinion, the high point of Frozen is its music. It’s a classic Disney musical with catchy tunes. “Let It Go”, “Love is an Open Door”, “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?”, “In Summer”—the bangers don’t stop. Of course, the oversaturation I mentioned earlier led to people getting tired of these popular songs, but I don’t think that should be held against them. I hadn’t watched Frozen in years, but the fun and memorable music came right back to me as I rewatched it for this project. It holds up, and this movie deserves its flowers for bringing such great musical performances alive via the magic of animation. The movie’s score is also excellent; the music between the musical numbers does a great job of highlighting the action of the film and creating its atmosphere. 

Of course, visuals and music are great, but the heart of any movie is its narrative. How does Frozen hold up? It aims to subvert classic Disney stereotypes, with the handsome prince Ana meets actually being Stranger Danger, and the “act of true love” being familial love instead of romantic. It’s a novel idea for a Disney movie, and I think they executed it well, but it’s not anything groundbreaking. Learning to be wary of people you don’t know well is something most of us have been taught from a very young age, and understanding that romantic love isn’t the end-all be-all of love is a good message, but not a revolutionary one. I would say Frozen is a fun movie with a good message (especially for younger viewers), but it doesn’t go far below the surface or say anything new. 

With all that said, what were the other 2013 nominees like? Can any of them make a case against this cultural juggernaut?

The Other Animated Features

The Croods — Eli

Nominated

Most big-budget animated films have some sort of tenet they’re trying to convey. Whether it be Pixar’s idealistic, universally relatable themes, Ghibli’s intellectual critiques on war or the world at large, or even DreamWorks’ own deconstructions of popular movie tropes, just about everything with a Hollywood budget and a megastudio creative team has a point.

Every once in a while, though, we get a blockbuster hit about nothing. The first one of these that I had the awareness to recognize upon watching was Pixar’s Luca (2021), a widely beloved movie that is ostensibly about coming of age and fitting in as an outsider but is practically about little more than three adolescents trying to defeat a town bully. I got next to nothing from watching Luca (and I gave it a fairly negative review in Pixar Pints as a result), but many of the movie’s fans tell me that that’s exactly the point: it’s just a fun summer movie to induce nostalgia for simpler times. True as that may be, it still threw me off guard coming from a studio like Pixar which has built its reputation on thematic brilliance over the course of nearly three decades.

I’d say I got Luca vibes from watching DreamWorks’ The Croods, but even that might be giving it too much credit. Luca was at least pleasantly inconsequential; The Croods is uselessly nonsensical.

The Croods is about a prehistoric family of cavemen whose father is an overbearing traditionalist and disallows everyone else from breaking his long list of rules out of fear that even one misstep will lead to certain death. The most important of these rules is to basically never leave the cave they call home, but when the cave is destroyed by an earthquake, they’re forced to relocate to a safer space. In the process, they meet a much more inventive caveman who’s made his way through life with cleverness and ingenuity. You can probably mentally fill in the rest of the synopsis based on the exposition I’ve just provided.

If I were to try to assign one theme to The Croods, it would be “breaking tradition”, as the only real character development in the 98-minute runtime comes from the father realizing that perhaps his rules have been too strict and he could stand to ease up on his family. But it’s hard for this throughline to have any real power when the father regularly assumed any and every activity would lead directly to an early grave and he spent the whole movie lashing out at the very concept of using your brain.

At the end of the day, the moral of the story to me is “it’s okay not to live your life in abject fear of everything always”, which just isn’t a very compelling narrative. The only time I could possibly see this being useful to a general audience is in the late stages of a worldwide plague that had rendered most day-to-day socialization potentially life-threatening and forced everyone indoors for the previous two years, but that’s such a microscopically unlikely, fatalistic scenario…(Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison directly referenced exactly this in late 2021 while trying to steer his country back to normalcy).

I haven’t even gotten into the animation in this thing; it’s uncharacteristically bad for a DreamWorks joint. A lot of pan shots look amateurish, as if we’re watching partially rendered displays of concept art. I genuinely don’t understand how such a groundbreaking, pioneering studio put out animation this uninspired. It looks worse than Despicable Me 2 despite having double its budget.³

Oh god, Despicable Me 2. I still have to talk about that garbage. Ugh! Alright, enough about this one, then.

Verdict: Not a better animated feature

Despicable Me 2 — Eli

Nominated

I really just cannot bother interacting with Illumination in the way that I interact with most art. The studio’s entire existence is founded on very obviously cutting corners and belching out products with little artistic vision.

Despicable Me 2, the follow-up to Illumination’s widely heralded debut Despicable Me (2010), is the studio’s first Best Animated Feature nominee in four tries. You may be surprised that Despicable Me was not nominated for Best Animated Feature in 2010 given the cultural force the franchise has become—I sure was—but 2010 was a much stronger year than 2013. Only three movies were nominated that year (the last time that’s happened to date), but even if two more got the nod, Despicable Me might not have been one of them, as Megamind and Tangled were both snubbed as well.

If you think I’m padding out this review with random facts about other, more interesting topics, you’re absolutely right; I have next to nothing to say about this focus-grouped commodity. It’s trite and thematically uninteresting, especially if you didn’t care for the first film, and it is perhaps the most obnoxious movie I’ve watched for Better Animated Feature thus far. The worst, most annoying parts of Steve Carell still come out when he’s voicing Gru, and he heads the scene that has—out of any scene from any movie—most made me regret taking on this project: the “21 fart gun” salute.

As far as positives, however few, I do think Kristen Wiig puts in a good performance as Lucy. Additionally, I actually enjoyed the Minions more than just about anything else in this movie (their musical renditions were a highlight), so it’s no surprise to me that they’ve been the thing everyone has latched onto from this franchise.

Unfortunately, everything else either irritated me or bored me (or both), and I’m overwhelmingly glad that this is the last I’ll have to see of this series.

Verdict: Not a better animated feature

Ernest & Celestine — Leah

Nominated

Watching Ernest & Celestine felt like watching a storybook come to life. The movie is an adaptation of a series of picture books, and those roots show while watching this movie. The art style is painterly, reminiscent of the sort of illustrations found in picture books, defining the characters with brushstrokes and soft colors. The story itself is also reminiscent of a picture book tale, watching an anthropomorphized mouse (Celestine) befriend an anthropomorphized bear (Ernest) in a society where bears live in the town on the surface and mice live in the city underground, and neither group mixes. It’s a cute movie about understanding others and overcoming prejudice.

Using animals as a metaphor for real world prejudice can be tricky to execute (more on this in 2016), but this movie pulls it off by anthropomorphizing its characters, both bear and mouse, to the same degree. They might be bear-people and mouse-people, with their cities influenced by the characteristics of their species, but they’re still portrayed as ultimately people. That is to say, there’s not an inherently imbalanced dynamic, like predator/prey or human/animal. Instead, the mice’s fear of the “big bad bear” and the bears’ disgust for the mice are shown as people believing in stereotypes and not taking the time to understand each other.

The development of the relationship between Celestine and Ernest reinforces this theme to show how the two grow to care for each other. Their friendship is both humorous and touching, creating a center that is the beating heart of the movie.

I’ve already spent several paragraphs in this piece talking about how Frozen has a good but relatively simple message. The same could be said about this movie, but I think the relationship between Celestine and Ernest is more compelling than the relationship between Elsa and Ana. The leads of this movie spend more time together developing their relationship, while the leads of Frozen spend most of the movie separated. The viewer watches Ernest develop from apathy toward Celestine to deeply caring about her. Celestine is able to thrive with Ernest in a way that none of her relationships with other mice had cultivated before.

This is another case where I feel like personal taste will be the ultimate decider of Better Animated Feature. Frozen is a beautiful, well crafted Disney musical, while Ernest & Celestine is a touching narrative that feels like a storybook come to life. Which art style speaks more to you? Which message? Do you prefer big, choreographed musical numbers or more whimsical, understated scenes? Each of these movies has different strengths, and they’re both worth watching. Ernest & Celestine has enough going for it that I will give it the title of:

Verdict: Better Animated Feature

The Wind Rises — Leah

Nominated

I can’t believe it has already been eight years since I last argued that a Ghibli film should have won Best Animated Feature. Unfortunately, I need to wait another ten years to be vindicated, but until then, let me explain why The Wind Rises is a cinematic masterpiece.

The Wind Rises follows the fictionalized life story of Jiro Horikoshi, an aeronautical engineer who dreamed of creating airplanes from a young age. The film follows him through engineering school and his career as he aspires to build beautiful airplanes. Part of achieving that dream requires building planes for the military to be used for combat. We also follow Jiro’s tragic love story with Nahoko Satomi, a young woman afflicted with tuberculosis.

That’s a very pared-down, understated description of this movie. I could try to describe the dream sequences where Jiro talks to his idol—another airplane engineer, Giovanni Battista Caproni—or the role secret police play in the plot of the movie and how they affect the characters. I could talk about the imagery of the movie, the beautiful and the tragic. However, there’s no substitute for experiencing this film, and I don’t want to bog you, my dear Low Major reader, with a bunch of details that won’t seem as meaningful without the context. Instead, I want to explain why this movie deserved to win.

Frozen is a good movie; I don’t want to dispute that. It was also a wildly successful movie that captured the imaginations of countless people (while also annoying countless others with its ubiquity). Disney’s strength is in their musicals, and Frozen doesn’t disappoint with a banger soundtrack. However, I don’t think it comes close to the thematic density of The Wind Rises.

Frozen is a critique and a subversion of Disney stereotypes. It’s a film concept I quite like, but it takes a surface level approach to its themes. Marrying someone you met the same day is a bad idea for the purpose of “true love”; I doubt many people would push back on that. Even in a different cultural context, where marriages are arranged and people who don’t know each other do get married, there’s still familial and community guidance and involvement in the process. Ana meets Hans the same day she decides to marry him, so of course it goes poorly. It’s a good message for younger people, not trusting someone they don’t know well pushing for things far too fast, but it’s not profound or nuanced. The other subversion is the “act of true love” coming from familial/sisterly love instead of romantic love. This is also a good message, as it’s important to recognize what different types of love add to our lives, and not disregard them in favor of romantic love. But again, this isn’t something I find super profound.

Compare these to the themes offered in The Wind Rises. This could have been a basic “follow your dreams” story, but this movie takes a more nuanced approach. Jiro does follow his aspiration to create airplanes, but it did come at a cost. What does it mean to make something beautiful that will inevitably be used for destruction? What did Jiro’s choices mean? Especially considering that the events of the movie were set in Japan as they were preparing to enter World War II. The viewer can also observe how Jiro’s career intersects with his relationship with Nahoko. This movie really made me think as someone familiar with how anti-war Miyazaki’s filmography is. It seems like an odd choice for someone who has spent their career making films critical of war to tell a story not only about someone making war planes, but also making them sympathetic. Though, like I said, making airplanes came at a cost. This movie is still critical of war, but in a subtle way.

Frozen is a fantastic example of CGI animation, while The Wind Rises exemplifies artistic hand-drawn animation. Which style someone might prefer is subjective and ultimately comes down to personal preference. I appreciate The Wind Rises for being a beautiful, striking hand-drawn film. By 2013, hand-drawn films had been out of vogue for about a decade. I appreciate that The Wind Rises worked to further that medium. Frozen has lots of great visuals too; I don’t want to disparage the art style Disney used to make this movie, but it just didn’t stand out to me in the same way. A lot of movies use a style similar to Frozen, and I think The Wind Rises should get consideration for using a less contemporary style and doing it incredibly well. Keeping hand-drawn animation alive is an unambiguously good thing for the medium of animation.

Overall, The Wind Rises tells a more nuanced, interesting story. Frozen is a fun story and an excellent musical, but it just doesn’t make me think in the same way The Wind Rises does, and it did not absorb me or stick with me in the same way. Frozen is a good movie, but it doesn’t come close to the depths of The Wind Rises. Frozen plays it safe, while The Wind Rises takes more risks as a film. And I think this sort of artistic integrity is exactly what makes The Wind Rises a:

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)
2007: 3 better (2 nominated; 1 snubbed)
2008: 0 better (2 nominated; 0 snubbed)
2009: 2 better (4 nominated; 2 snubbed)
2010: 3 better (2 nominated; 4 snubbed)
2011: 1 better (4 nominated; 0 snubbed)
2012: 4 better (4 nominated; 1 snubbed)
2013: 2 better (4 nominated; 0 snubbed)
TOTAL: 24 better (36 nominated; 18 snubbed)

Join us in two weeks when, after earning no traction with movies 1 through 5, the Big Hero franchise comes out of nowhere to take home the hardware with their beloved sixth movie.

Next: 2014 (4 nominated; 1 snubbed)

1. Happy 16th birthday to me, I guess. Fun fact: on this day, my friends and I went to Chuck E. Cheese to celebrate as a joke, and we had so much fun that we all went back for my 17th birthday unironically.

2. I can’t be the only one who ever thinks about how Frozen is canonically set during the summer.

3. Although the last DreamWorks film I reviewed for this project was Puss In Boots, which also had terrible animation, so maybe I’m just giving DreamWorks more credit than they deserve.