Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Animated Movie 2017

The Contenders:

The Boss Baby
The Breadwinner
Coco (winner)
Ferdinand
Loving Vincent

Really Junior Executives

Film: The Boss Baby
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on the latest internet machine.

When The Boss Baby was nominated for Best Animated Feature, I knew that eventually I would have to watch it. Since it is streaming on NetFlix at the moment, I figured that I could knock it out quickly and therefore not have it hanging over my head for too long. After all, this is the nomination that caused raised eyebrows around the country (at least) since once again a LEGO movie was left off the nominations. No LEGO Batman Movie. Instead, we get this.

The truth is that The Boss Baby, while almost certainly much less of a film than The LEGO Batman Movie, isn’t terrible. It’s also, sadly, not that great. I’ll admit it comes with sort of a cute idea, but it’s taken to some really ridiculous places that don’t really work. It feels like it started with a good voice cast (and it is, top to bottom) and cobbled together a plot to use them. It wasn’t fully developed enough to avoid some pretty strange plot holes.