Better Animated Feature: 2021
Disney has released one (1) good movie since Moana, but they still got two nominees this year.
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Eli: In movies, as in most aspects of life, 2021 was mostly an extension of 2020. Theatrical releases were limited until the last few months of the year and some of this year’s Hollywood releases were films originally scheduled for 2020 but pushed back by the virus.
Missing the cut this year were sequels to The Boss Baby and Sing, a PAW Patrol movie I didn’t know existed before five seconds ago, a Japanese science fantasy take on Beauty and the Beast, and something called Cryptozoo (which a header in its Wikipedia article has to note is not the scam NFT game created by Logan Paul).
Instead of those certain classics, we got two movies from Disney, another from Pixar, and one from Sony, as well as an…indie documentary? Huh. Well, this piece was already nine pages long on Google Docs before I started writing the intro, so I’m sure you can read all about it below. Let’s get started.
The Nominees
Encanto (won Best Animated Feature)
Flee (nominated)
Luca (nominated)
The Mitchells vs. the Machines (nominated)
Raya and the Last Dragon (nominated)
The “Best” Animated Feature: Encanto
Eli: Alright, so…you’re all familiar with the eras of Disney animation, yeah? They go a little something like this:
Golden Age (1937–1942) | Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi
Wartime Era (1943–1949) | The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Silver Age (1950–1967) | Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book
Bronze Age (1970–1977) | The Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Rescuers
Dark Age (1981–1988) | The Fox and the Hound, Oliver & Company
Renaissance (1989–1999) | Aladdin, The Lion King, Hercules
Experimental Era (2000–2008) | Lilo & Stitch, Meet the Robinsons
Revival (2009–present) | The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, Big Hero 6
To my knowledge, these are more or less set in stone. Sometimes the Bronze Age and the Dark Age are combined, but everyone seems to agree that, say, the Renaissance began with The Little Mermaid and ended with Tarzan before Dinosaur came along and ushered in a new, somewhat worse era.
Another thing that seemingly everyone agrees on is that the Revival continues to the present day, the logic mostly being that this era coincides with Disney’s all-out plunge into computer-generated, 3D animation, as well as its return to telling Disney Princess stories after the previous era had zero in 11 movies. To this point, the Revival has given us many beloved Princess tales (like Tangled, Frozen, and Moana) and other, non-Princess 3D classics (like Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6, and—love it or hate it—Zootopia).
Y’know somethin’, though? Every single movie I just mentioned is at least eight years old.
Including the newly released Moana 2, Disney has given us seven movies since Moana (2016) and, according to the critical consensus of hundreds of thousands of moviegoers on Letterboxd, these movies are almost categorically significantly worse than the ones at the beginning of the era. Critics cite several issues: mediocre-to-bad soundtracks, stagnation in aesthetic and animation compared to competing studios, writing so bad that it has somewhat credibly been accused of being generated by AI, and an overreliance on sequels to the point that it seems like Disney is taking movies that in previous eras would have released directly to video and giving them theatrical releases because they know they’ll make bank.
In other words, Disney has been putting out slop for almost a decade now. And with two of the studio’s next three upcoming movies also being sequels (Zootopia 2 and Frozen III), it’s unclear when the tides will turn. I’d say we’ve got more than enough supporting evidence to admit we left the Revival behind a long time ago.
Behold, the ninth era of Disney Animation:
Welcome to the Slop Era. It’s a bit of a harsh moniker, I know. But consider the following: by average rating, the Slop Era just barely beats out the era in which Disney was spending most of their resources putting out World War II propaganda and is dwarfed by every other era. The average Letterboxd rating of a Walt Disney Animation Studios movie is 3.45; only one movie in the Slop Era rates out as even slightly better than that average.
That movie is this year’s Best Animated Feature, Encanto, which is the exception to nearly every rule of this era. The soundtrack, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, is great, anchored by the megahit “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”, which became just the second song from a Walt Disney Animation Studios soundtrack to top the Billboard Hot 100,1 staying there for five weeks. The writing treats generational trauma with the seriousness it deserves while also staying lighthearted enough to feel heartwarming. And, most importantly, it’s a well conceived, original idea, not a sequel cashing in the good will earned by a better movie with the same coat of paint. On the surface, the only thing Encanto has in common with the rest of Disney’s Slop Era output is the over-polished animation style, but even here, there are high points: the Casa Madrigal’s animation gives it the personality of a human character without needing to use words, and many of the musical numbers are choreographed beautifully.
All in all, I would not only agree that Encanto is the clear diamond in the Slop Era rough, but also go further and say that it’s somewhat underrated (as my own 4.0 rating for this movie on Letterboxd will attest).
Let’s see how it stacks up against this year’s other nominees (including another Slop Era product from Disney).
The Other Animated Features
Flee — Leah
Nominated
Flee has a unique distinction among the nominees we’ve reviewed: it’s a documentary. It tells the story of Amin Nawabi and how he fled Afghanistan as a refugee. Scenes from his life are recreated with animation, interspersed with historical footage showing context for the events from his life. The medium allows memories from his life to be recreated, and it also allows his interviews to be shown without revealing his true identity.
Overall, Flee is a compelling film. I found myself engrossed in Amin’s story, rooting for him and his family to escape the oppression they faced while fleeing for safety. The film also showed how his experiences as a refugee affected his present-day relationships, as it shows his relationship with his present partner, Kasper. Amin is a gay man, and the movie shows the intersection of that experience with his experience as an Afghan refugee.
I enjoyed the art direction of the film. The main style of the film looked good and fit in with the tone of the movie. The flashback scenes that used a less detailed, more abstract style hit hard emotionally, and expressed the difficulty of remembering those moments.
2021 marks the twenty-year anniversary of the Best Animated Feature category, and as I’ve travelled through the years, a few trends have become apparent with the films that get nominated and the films that actually win, so I feel like I’ve explained the reasons this film wouldn’t win several times before with several other movies. It’s a foreign film, it’s small-budget, it’s made for adults, et cetera. This year’s winner Encanto is a Disney film with a huge budget, cutting-edge animation, and all the recognition and star power that Disney commands. Of course Flee’s strengths aren’t going to be able to overcome that gap.
If you’ve been following along with my writing for this project, you probably won’t be surprised that I’ll argue against those things being the only qualities that should be considered valuable for a “Best Animated Feature”. What makes Flee stand out amongst the other big budget nominees for this year is that it tells a true story and preserves history. It uses animation as a way to make a documentary that could not exist otherwise. It allows memories from Amin’s life to be presented to viewers so they can understand and develop empathy for his experiences. Personally, I think that’s a great achievement of animation and an original way of using the medium. I want to see more animated films like Flee, preserving history and personal narratives. I want to see more animated films that do something unique and break away from the big studio formulas.
Encanto is a good movie. I enjoyed watching it and think that it’s one of Disney’s better films. The music, the animation, the story, and the portrayal of Colombian culture were all excellent. I understand why it won. But when I think about which movie challenged me more, which movie I took more away from, Flee wins easily. Picking which movie is “best” is always going to be a subjective task. This year, I think that Flee’s unique use of the medium and historical significance are enough to consider it a:
Verdict: Better Animated Feature
Luca — Preston
Nominated
There are a lot of different narratives you can tell based on the similarities between Disney’s two big animated releases of 2021, Disney Animation’s Encanto and Pixar’s Luca.2 These are two pretty different stories—Encanto in particular is a much closer comparison to Coco than any other movie in the Disney canon—but in terms of structure and technique, it’s interesting to see how both of these studios are, in many ways, moving in the same direction.
On the one hand, both films fall short of perfection in a lot of the same ways. For Disney, coming off the run of Ralph Breaks the Internet, Frozen II, and Raya and the Last Dragon, a relative lack of originality in the plot isn’t too surprising; for Pixar, which seemed to be making strides back towards more non-conventional narratives with Soul, it’s a bit more disappointing. But both of these movies feel like they’re retreading ground that’s been covered quite a few times before; you know what to expect very quickly from Encanto’s Mirabel, struggling to live up to her family’s expectations, and Luca’s…Luca, struggling to overcome his and his family’s fear of the unknown. Both opening acts work, but they’re both pretty stale for Disney, and they just invite comparisons to other films by the same studios that execute those ideas as well or better.
On the other hand…if narrative innovation is a bit lacking in these movies, technical ambition certainly isn’t. Historically, both major wings of Disney’s animated production have shied away from using the medium for extensive fantasy sequences—they tend to prefer a more universally fantastical setting in which everything stays more or less grounded. But Encanto and Luca both represent shifts away from that philosophy, making full use of the possibilities offered by animation—the former with elaborate, musical-theater-logic songs that push even the film’s established cartoon physics, the latter with plentiful dream sequences and a lot of littler touches that emulate the expressiveness of traditional, 2D animation. Sure, neither movie’s gonna win any awards for unbelievably inventive stylization, but Disney and Pixar did more with it this year than they had in a long time.
I’m circling around the point of actually comparing these films because, well…it’s kinda hard to draw many distinctions between them, even on that technical level. That wouldn’t be too surprising for a couple movies from the same studio, but it’s rarer to see from a pair of competitors…even ones which are, of course, part of the same media company. I can’t really give out style points for whoever was going for something more ambitious (like I did last year, more or less), because both Encanto and Luca represent almost the exact same type of ambition, finally playing around with the animation style after years of simply refining what had been working.
More than anything, though, it’s hard to draw a comparison because you can’t quite trust how you feel at the end of either movie. Both are at their finest in their final act, when Encanto navigates a minefield of bad potential narrative decisions to put in a very strong ending, and Luca pulls off a dramatic finale sequence that I just can’t help but love. There are weak points along the journey, no doubt about that, but there honestly is something to be said for a movie that simply nails the warm-and-fuzzy happy ending, and Disney went 2-for-2 this year.3 If I’ve gotta pick just one, I’ll lean towards Encanto—for clearly superior voice acting, if nothing else—but it’s a close call. If you’re gonna watch either of these movies, do yourself a favor and watch both. They’re more than worth it.
Verdict: Not a better animated feature
The Mitchells vs. the Machines — Leah
Nominated
The Mitchells vs. the Machines follows Katie Mitchell, a young woman about to start film school being forced to go on a road trip with her family to college. Feeling a bit out of place, she looks forward to the chance to go to school and meet “her people.” She is misunderstood by her father and isn’t happy that he’s trying to force this attempt at family bonding onto her. The road trip takes an unexpected turn when the robot apocalypse comes for all humanity, as a rogue AI has taken control of a robot army to round up all the humans and send them off into space, leaving the robots to control the Earth, as they believe humanity doesn’t deserve it. The Mitchells are the last remaining free humans, and thus have the fate of the world on their shoulders. But in order to save the world, they need to save their interpersonal relationships first.
The Mitchells vs. the Machines is a fun movie that tells a touching story about a family learning to understand each other in spite of their differences. Katie Mitchell is a great protagonist, filling the misunderstood artist archetype and adding a creative flair to the movie as the effects she makes for her films also show up in the movie as 2D drawings, complementing the action of the movie’s 3D animation. She’s also an important first, as the first lesbian leading character in a kids’ animated movie.4
The animation in Mitchells is eye-catching and exciting. The 2D effects interspersed throughout the movie give it a lot of character. I love the cartoony character designs and the stylization in the movie, and I have to commend the art direction, as there’s something to enjoy visually in every frame. Sony built upon the work they did with Into the Spider-Verse to make this (adding this to the long list of movies Spider-Verse influenced).
2021 had a good movie win Best Animated Feature in Encanto. Disney did a great job with the animation, the story, and the music. I think whether one prefers Encanto to The Mitchells vs. the Machine will largely come down to personal preference and experience. There are a few places where Mitchells has an edge that make it worth considering for this award. For one, the animation and art direction are more unique than Encanto, which uses the Disney style we’ve come to know over the past decade or so. More importantly, the queer representation is a huge step forward for feature film animation, and Mitchells should be recognized as a trailblazer in that regard.
Honestly, this is one of those years where I would say it’s a toss-up. In an alternate universe, maybe I’m writing about what Encanto has that Mitchells doesn’t for Better Animated Feature. I can understand the case for both films. However, The Mitchells vs. the Machines has enough going for it that I’d definitely recommend checking it out if you haven’t, and I also feel confident enough calling it a:
Verdict: Better Animated Feature
Raya and the Last Dragon — Eli
Nominated
The further I get into this series, the less I’m willing to give any credit to bad nominees. That’s partially because, by this point in the timeline, the medium of animation has improved so much that it has become inexcusable for a bad movie to be nominated for Best Animated Feature. More importantly, though: I’m just tired, man. I’ve been the go-to guy for major studio releases in this series. I’ve watched a lot of slop. And Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Raya and the Last Dragon is slop. Disney was indeed deep in their Slop Era with this one.
I hardly even feel the need to touch on the most controversial aspects of this film, though I’ll spend the next three paragraphs on them anyway. Awkwafina, who voices the titular “last dragon” Sisu, became a target of controversy in late 2021 for her use of a blaccent despite being Asian American. This controversy kicked into overdrive in early 2022 when she was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for her voice acting in Raya and the Last Dragon. Awkwafina is still a prolific and polarizing voice actor to this day, but her performance in this specific movie probably wouldn’t crack a list of my five least favorite things about it.
Raya and the Last Dragon also received criticism for its refusal to tell the story of any specific culture, instead opting for a general Southeast Asian hodgepodge that is at best incomprehensible and at worst culturally insensitive. The set designs, character designs, and music are all seemingly lab-crafted to say nothing more specific than “Asia”. However, I've seen worse botch jobs when it comes to cultural representation, including from Disney themselves, so this isn't my main problem with the movie either, though it is stunning in this regard how awful this movie was compared to Encanto, released just 264 days later.
The movie shows striking thematic similarities to a good amount of other, better children’s media that handles the same topics far more gracefully. Lindsay Ellis got run off Twitter for saying this but she was absolutely right: I’m legitimately not sure how you could watch this movie and conclude that Avatar: The Last Airbender wasn’t a major influence unless you simply hadn't seen it. The opening infodump scene might as well be a shot-for-shot remake of the AtLA intro, and yet this is also not my main problem with Raya and the Last Dragon.
No, this movie’s failures are too fundamental for me to look too far into the gory details. The voice direction is terrible; several voice actors have multiple line reads that just sound straight-up wrong, and when the issue is that widespread, the blame falls on the director, not the actors. The pacing is awful and the 107-minute runtime seems at once too long and too short. Almost no imagination went into the presentation of this movie. The animation, though genuinely beautiful in some spots, mostly just feels like template modern Disney schlock. The character designs, though pretty enough, are all the same forgettable human models Disney has used for a decade at this point, and the Big Bad is just a giant, amorphous, black-and-purple cloud. It’s all technically somewhat impressive but creatively very flat.
None of the above holds a candle to the most unforgivable thing about Raya and the Last Dragon: the moral of the story is completely incoherent. (Spoilers for the rest of this overlong paragraph.) Raya (Kelly Marie Tran) sets the story into motion by placing her trust in Namaari (Gemma Chan) and immediately paying the price for it. She’s obviously going to have trust issues from that point forward, for very good reason, but the movie seems to want us to think that’s a bad thing. Sisu spends most of the movie insisting that trusting people is the only way to save the world, and she never shows any nuance in this position, even when that trust leads to instant betrayal. This leads to Sisu imploring Raya to blindly trust Namaari again, with Raya maintaining that that would be a terrible idea but doing it anyway for some reason (???). Namaari unsurprisingly betrays Raya’s trust again and starts a giant fight that nearly ends all life on Earth, but the movie brute forces Namaari into having a change of heart at the last possible moment and then treats it as if Sisu was right the whole time (?????). I seriously cannot comprehend what point this movie is trying to make about trust, and when that’s your central tenet, that’s a critical failure.
Raya and the Last Dragon deserves no comparison to Encanto despite being released by the same studio in the same year.
Shoutout to Patti Harrison, though: first openly transgender actor with a voice role in a Disney animated film.
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)
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)
2020: 2 better (4 nominated; 0 snubbed)
2021: 2 better (4 nominated; 0 snubbed)
TOTAL: 42 better (68 nominated; 20 snubbed)
Join us in two weeks, when Guillermo del Toro joins the party with his take on the classic Pinocchio story!
Next: 2022 (4 nominated; 0 snubbed)
“A Whole New World” from Aladdin was the first.
Yes, technically Walt Disney Animation Studios did also release Raya and the Last Dragon. I’m choosing not to acknowledge it for reasons that Eli will elaborate on below. (The reasons are that it’s bad.)
Nope. Still not acknowledging it.
Editor’s note: I can’t believe people complained about Katie’s queerness not being obvious enough until the end of the movie. They used a Grimes song in an expositional montage and Katie was wearing a rainbow pin for basically the whole runtime. I don’t know what more you could realistically want except for her to straight-up say “I am lesbian”. Queer characters don’t need plot-advancing queer romances to prove their queerness. Soapbox over. —Eli
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