Better Animated Feature: 2019

A lot of old friends came to visit this year. Which one was the most welcome?

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Eli: 2019 was the year of the sequel: seemingly every noteworthy American studio released some sort of sequel this year. Relative little guys Warner Bros. Pictures Animation (The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part), Sony Pictures Animation (The Angry Birds Movie 2), and Illumination (The Secret Life of Pets 2) all missed out on nominations for Best Animated Feature. Industry giant Walt Disney Animation Studios fared no better with Frozen II.

In the end, it came down, as it often does, to DreamWorks and Pixar. The former released How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, the long-awaited third and final movie in that series, while the latter released Toy Story 4, the somewhat baffling fourth and infuriatingly not final movie in that series. Both movies were nominated, but Pixar was crowned King of Sequels and took home the award.

That leaves three other nominees, none of which were sequels to anything, clearly dooming them from the start. Here in America, LAIKA gave us Missing Link, their fifth feature film and fifth nominee. In France, Xilam gave us a rare R-rated nominee: I Lost My Body. And in Spain, animation veteran Sergio Pablos (perhaps best known for writing and executive producing Despicable Me) gave us Klaus. Both foreign films were originally released on Netflix, making both the first Academy-nominated animated films released directly to streaming.

Did the correct sequel win? Did a sequel deserve to win at all? Are both statements somehow false? Read on for the answers to these burning questions.

The Nominees

Toy Story 4 (won Best Animated Feature)
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (nominated)
I Lost My Body (nominated)
Klaus (nominated)
Missing Link (nominated)

The “Best” Animated Feature: Toy Story 4

Eli: Toy Story 4 is the ultimate litmus test for whether someone is willing to eat up anything Pixar puts out. It does the bare minimum required to result in a passable big-budget animated film and then stops to rest on the laurels of the studio’s most bankable franchise. Maybe you can blame it on John Lasseter leaving Pixar midway through production or maybe the creative team just knew any Toy Story movie would succeed no matter what. Whatever it was, the result was a pleasantly stale entry in Pixar’s filmography—one that did just about everything it set out to do and yet one I honestly can’t imagine anyone loving if not for the title.

I struggled to write a detailed review of Toy Story 4 for Pixar Pints a couple years ago and I’m struggling again today. I’m not interested in repeating myself for such an uninteresting movie, so you can go back and read what little I did write in 2022 if you really want specifics.

Suffice it to say that the door is wide open for other Best Animated Feature hopefuls to be more deserving of this year’s award. Let’s see how many took advantage.

The Other Animated Features

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World — Leah

Nominated

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World is the conclusion to the beloved How to Train Your Dragon trilogy, following Hiccup and his dragon, Toothless, as they navigate some big changes in their lives, both personally and on a broader scale. Hiccup is the new chief of Berk and he struggles with both the island becoming overcrowded with all the dragons he’s been rescuing and the new threat of Grimmel the Grisly trying to hunt down the last Night Fury (Toothless). He uses a female Light Fury as bait and Toothless quickly develops a crush on her.  

Overall, it’s a touching story and a bittersweet way to end the trilogy. It can be hard to learn to let go of someone or something you love, and find a new way forward as life doesn’t turn out how you expect. It fit in with the tone and the narrative set by the previous movies and provided a fitting conclusion to the series, even if its ending wasn’t universally beloved by fans. It still had the same humor and heart of the first two movies and carried on the spirit of the franchise.  

The animation and aesthetic of The Hidden World do not disappoint. My favorite part of the movie visually was getting to see the Hidden World, a truly gorgeous setting that shows off what animation can achieve in the modern era. Comparing this to the first movie, it’s clear how much has been achieved technically since the start of the decade.

In 2010, I compared the original How to Train Your Dragon with Toy Story 3. That comparison was a lot closer for me than this one will be. Toy Story 4 is one of the movies I’ve least enjoyed watching for this project. It’s derivative of the original trilogy, taking concepts and presenting them in a worse, less satisfying way. I think what bothered me the most upon watching it was the way the toys in Toy Story 4 acted almost as guardian angels for children. The toys interfered with the humans around them to a higher degree than in any of the previous movies, and it made the established world feel less believable.

One similarity between the two movies was the theme of saying goodbye when moving on to a different chapter of one’s life. It’s an experience that most people can relate to and it can be both a freeing and difficult part of life. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World did a better job expressing this idea because the whole film trilogy was building up to it, while Toy Story 4 felt disconnected from the original trilogy. I also think it just did a better job making me care about the characters. The arc Toothless and Hiccup go through feels more meaningful than Woody’s arc in Toy Story 4.

Both movies are large-budget CGI movies, so they’re on even footing with resources from an art and animation perspective. Personally, I found The Hidden World more impressive aesthetically. Nothing in Toy Story 4 comes close to the beauty of the titular Hidden World. The Hidden World just had a more complex setting and more complex character designs. The improvement from 2010 was more impressive with the How to Train Your Dragon movies than between Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4.

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World was a movie people were anticipating, meant to conclude a story that many were invested in. Toy Story 4 was a movie made to cash in on the success of the first three movies without adding anything meaningful to the concept. Love or hate how How to Train Your Dragon ended, it was a thoughtful ending that expanded on what had been developed in the prior movies. Toy Story 4 paid its franchise no such regard.

Verdict: Better Animated Feature

I Lost My Body — Leah

Nominated

I Lost My Body follows a severed hand that escapes from a laboratory in Paris and travels through the city to find and reunite with its body. As the hand journeys through Paris, we’re told the story of Naoufel, the person the hand is trying to reunite with, through a series of flashbacks, slowly revealing the circumstances that led to this point. It’s a poignant and emotional narrative that drew me in, feeling invested in both the story of the hand and the story of Naoufel’s life.

It’s a surreal and creative concept for a film and it lends itself perfectly to the medium of animation. From the description, it’s not hard to guess that this movie has a lot of horror elements. There was an artfulness to how freaky some of the scenes in this movie were. The animation style drew from a wealth of techniques, blending 2D and 3D animation to create a more realistic animation style. The blog I linked includes concept art for the hand and discussion on the thought process of how to animate it. Since severed hands can’t actually move on their own in the real world, it took a bit of imagination to make it into an animated character. Throughout this project, I haven’t watched a movie with a style and animation quite like this, but it worked very well within the context of this movie.

I also have to applaud the scoring of this film. The main musical motif of this film underscored the emotions behind it. With one of the main characters incapable of speech, the music adds a lot to the tone and emotion of the scenes with the severed hand. 

I Lost My Body is a film with a lot of abstract ideas and symbolism that is open to viewer interpretation. It touches on themes of death and loss and love and destiny. The visuals and story of the movie complement these ideas to create a rich cinematic experience. 

After watching I Lost My Body, I was left wondering about the voters who watched this movie and Toy Story 4 and came to the conclusion that Toy Story 4 was the superior film. What could they possibly see in Toy Story 4 that made it better than I Lost My Body? It’s true I Lost My Body isn’t a big-budget CGI film, but they did a lot with what they had, creating fantastic visuals in spite of a small budget. As far as narrative goes, I Lost My Body is a well-crafted, original story, while Toy Story 4 is more or less a cash-in ripoff of the previous three films in the series.

I’ve already talked about my issues with Toy Story 4 in the Hidden World section, so I won’t rehash those, but suffice it to say I was not impressed. I honestly don’t think it deserved to win against any of the other nominees from this year, but this one feels particularly egregious as I compare the two films. After I finished watching this movie, I was talking to Eli about it and how I couldn’t believe there were people out there who thought Toy Story 4 was the better movie. They suggested it was an indication of the Academy believing that animation is only for kids. I think that might be it. The odds were always going to be stacked against I Lost My Body. It was a foreign indie film made for adults, about as far away from a Pixar movie as spiritually possible. The R-rated I Lost My Body is not an appropriate film for children. Even discounting the gore and bad language and sexual content, it’s a narrative meant to appeal to adult sensibilities and experiences. Of course, Toy Story 4 would be a better movie for kids, despite not being a good movie.

Well, I don’t share that philosophy. Animation is a medium that can be enjoyed by everyone and can be used to tell stories specific to all the stages of life from childhood to adulthood. I Lost My Body is an original, striking film with a great premise, while Toy Story 4 is an unoriginal cash grab that is a net-negative for the franchise as a whole. If you want to watch something different and have access to Netflix, I highly recommend checking out I Lost My Body. It’s clearly a better film than Toy Story 4 and, as such, deserves to be considered a:

Verdict: Better Animated Feature

Klaus— Preston

Nominated

Execution counts for a lot in film. That’s true in every artistic discipline, but it’s perhaps more a factor in cinema than in other mediums, where it can be harder to make something truly compelling without an underlying concept that’s intrinsically rich and worthy of exploration.

I say this because I’m comparing two movies here that, from a plot synopsis alone, aren’t all that inherently interesting. Toy Story 4 is a tacked-on sequel nearly a decade after the end of the original trilogy, a story that largely rehashes a lot of previously-seen plot beats and motifs; Klaus is a take on the tried-and-true Christmas movie story format of explaining just how the Santa legend came to be. There’s a marked contrast between these two films and, say, the two I looked at last year—Into the Spider-Verse and Mirai, which are both beautiful, rich, nuanced works brimming with narrative and thematic complexity. Both of this year’s movies could probably have told much the same tale in a ten-minute animated short; neither of last year’s could have.

But that’s not to say a lack of depth—in the core idea, at any rate—makes a movie bad. The magic of cinema is so often that it turns ordinary stories into wondrous, entrancing worlds worth losing oneself in, because there’s so much beyond just the concept to draw viewers in. This is, I think, why it’s hard to find a movie produced by a major studio that doesn’t find any audience at all; even if there are fundamental flaws in some aspects, any big-budget film is almost bound to hit on some good dialogue, good visual design, good cinematography, good choreography, and so on.

Execution is the one thing that keeps Toy Story 4 from being a complete embarrassment, to put it frankly. This is a bad, deeply pointless movie that doesn’t do anything new with the characters or the concepts, but you can’t really abjectly hate it because any Pixar movie is going to have its moments. There are some fun action sequences here! I like Tony Hale’s performance as Forky, even if he becomes entirely pointless after helping to kick off the main plot. The visuals are as strong as you’d expect of a late-2010s Pixar project. None of this is perfect, but there are points where any of these aspects can get you invested, at least a little bit.

But, if not perfection, certainly something better is needed in the execution of a movie like this to make it worthwhile. There’s not a lot that’s actually interesting or meaningful about this film, and whenever it doesn’t all flow together smoothly—when the voice acting hits a bump, when the plot demands a bit of character assassination, when Randy Newman’s score hits the completely wrong tone for no reason—you’re painfully reminded of that fact. When the execution fails, you start asking why am I watching this?, and Toy Story 4 does not have a convincing answer to that question.

Contrast that with Klaus, which is a few stories you’ve already seen before. If you recognize early on that it’s a bog-standard Spoiled Brat Learns to Appreciate What He Has movie crossed with a bog-standard The Magic of Christmas movie, you can pretty much predict beat-for-beat exactly what’s going to happen. But that isn’t a bad thing! The right execution can absolutely make a predictable film magical, and this is a perfect example. It’s visually gorgeous, has some stellar dialogue, features a ton of standout vocal performances (J.K. Simmons¹ and the late Norm McDonald, I mean, come on), has a lovely score, and lands every beat of its plot almost perfectly. You can only make so many Christmas movies an annual holiday tradition, and Klaus is one that absolutely deserves to be on the list.

Creative types tend to worry a lot about how there are no new stories left to be told, but that’s been true for a long time. That’s not to say there’s nothing new to explore at all, but when it comes down to it, a lot of what works to create a traditional, three-act story—the kind that makes a good blockbuster Pixar or Netflix film—has already been discovered and refined into a core story. You’ve seen movies like Klaus before (particularly if you’ve watched The Emperor’s New Groove, which really is remarkably similar), and you’ll see them again, but that doesn’t mean they lose their luster. There’s so much depth and opportunity in the art of filmmaking that the same story, retold, reworked, and reframed, can be just as incredible when done right. Toy Story 4 is a reminder that doing it right isn’t easy—but Klaus is a welcome reminder that it’s possible, and that the results can be well and truly magical.

Verdict: Better Animated Feature

Missing Link — Eli

Nominated

Time for one last walk down LAIKA Lane.

Missing Link, the studio’s fifth and most recent film, marks a stark shift in tone from their previous releases, as the darker, paranormal elements that have defined LAIKA to this point in their history are mostly gone, replaced with the comedic stylings of Zach Galifianakis.

And y’know what? It works well enough.

Great voice acting from Galifianakis, Hugh Jackman, and Zoe Saldaña, a fun, well paced story, and some pretty impressive sets make for an enjoyable watch throughout. The script is definitely the weak point, but where it fails, the aesthetic picks the film back up. There’s rarely a dull moment in Missing Link; right off the bat, LAIKA proved they could make an engaging comedy. Though they did leave plenty of room for improvement, not every studio would be able to pull off such a great stylistic adjustment.

Monetarily, LAIKA didn’t really pull it off either. You may, after reading the above paragraph, be surprised to learn that this film was actually a gigantic box office bomb and lost the studio over $100 million. This could have been for any number of reasons: it wasn’t marketed very well, it was the studio’s first feature film without a child protagonist, its main “friendly monster” character was frankly kinda ugly, and of course, the mere fact that it was a comedy was probably off-putting to fans of the studio. Whatever it was, it was still a critical success, and if you can make it past any initial apprehensions and actually enjoy the film for what it is, it’s not hard to see why.

It’s not perfect. Saldaña’s character is a pretty poorly written “strong, independent woman” type, the primary antagonist is underdeveloped, and almost all the character designs are forgettable. But it’s a solid effort overall, and despite the wishy-washy nature of this review, I’d say it deserved the nomination.

Did it deserve the award? Well, if you ask the Golden Globes, the answer is yes, as Missing Link actually won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature. And if you ask me, the answer is…also yes—at least if its competition is Toy Story 4. All the negatives I mentioned for Missing Link are also true of Toy Story 4 to a greater extent, plus this movie’s theming is much more consistent than that one’s and the filmmaking choices are…let’s say “less baffling”.

Ergo, Missing Link comes out ahead basically by default. It’s not the most remarkable movie I’ve ever seen, but when the competition is an actively trash Pixar sequel, “somewhat unremarkable” is enough.

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)
2014: 3 better (4 nominated; 1 snubbed)
2015: 2 better (4 nominated; 0 snubbed)
2016: 5 better (4 nominated; 1 snubbed)
2017: 0 better (4 nominated; 0 snubbed)
2018: 0 better (4 nominated; 0 snubbed)
2019: 4 better (4 nominated; 0 snubbed)
TOTAL: 38 better (60 nominated; 20 snubbed)

There’s no room for nuance here anymore. These past four Best Animated Feature winners have been either abominations to the medium or the best things we’ve ever seen—no middle ground.

Will either hold true for Soul?

Next: 2020 (4 nominated; 0 snubbed)

1. Who “reprised” his role as Santa Claus in Red One, released last week and critically panned.