Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Animated Feature 2013

The Contenders:

The Croods
Despicable Me 2
Ernest et Celestine
Frozen (winner)
The Wind Rises

Big Bad Bear

Film: Ernest et Celestine (Ernest & Celestine)
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla Digital on The Nook.

If you have a library card, I can’t recommend looking into Hoopla Digital strongly enough. Download movies for free, keep ‘em for a few days, watch ‘em at your leisure. I wish I’d discovered it earlier. Tonight I checked out Ernest et Celestine (Ernest & Celestine), watched it immediately, and returned it pretty much without leaving my chair. And since the titles get returned automatically, I didn’t even really need to return it. Okay, if you’re a purist and insist on watching this subtitled in the original French I’ve got nothing for you. That matters very little to me with animated films, so I honestly didn’t care.

Like many a movie made for children, there is a moral at the heart of Ernest & Celestine, which is obvious once you get to it but no less worthwhile because of its obviousness. We start in the mouse world with Celestine (Mackenzie Foy), an orphan who enjoys drawing pictures and making up stories. The mice live in terrible fear of bears, who they believe will eat them without any provocation. However, the mice are necessarily thrust into the city of the bears above their underground city. The entire mouse civilization is built on their incisors, and the best replacement for these should they wear out is bear teeth. In fact, the bears tell their children that mouse tooth fairies take their teeth, when it’s really just mice looking for replacement teeth.