Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Animated Feature 2020

The Contenders:

Onward
Over the Moon
A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
Soul (winner)
Wolfwalkers

Wolf Tales

Films: Wolfwalkers
Format: Streaming video from AppleTV on rockin’ flatscreen

We just got a three-month free trial of AppleTV. I convinced my wife that we should watch Ted Lasso, but I admit to some ulterior motives as well. There are a number of things I want to watch on the service (and I’ll be posting them soon), but I’ve been working on getting her to go for the free trial in no small part because I wanted to watch Wolfwalkers. That seems like a stretch aside from wanting to complete my Oscar list, but even without my Oscars project I would have wanted to watch this movie. Tomm Moore is one of those rare directors where I will actively seek out all of his work until one of us dies.

I’ll talk about the movie in a minute, but I want to talk about the style of Moore’s work because it is this that is so much of the appeal of films like The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and Wolfwalkers. The goal of modern animation seems to be to make things as realistic-looking as possible, to present an animated world that looks at least in some respects like the actual world. Moore doesn’t do that. His worlds are clearly animated, specifically 2-D, and clearly hand-drawn. There’s no attempt to make it look real, but instead to make it look appropriate for the story being told. It probably prevents his work from being taken seriously by a lot of people because it does look retro, or antique, or even amateurish compared with the high-tech animation studios. But it’s the art that sells the fantasy, and Moore always sells the fantasy.