Animation is not just for children. That’s certainly true of the five feature films nominated for an Academy Award in the animated category this year, although the two most likely winners are especially suitable for younger audiences and the other three are worthy diversions for tweens and teens. Catching up on the animated Oscar hopefuls of 2024 was a stimulating — and occasionally exhilarating — task.
The Latvian movie Flow, which is free to Max subscribers and rentable on Amazon and AppleTV, follows the fortunes of a small black cat and other animals — a capybara, lemur, retriever-like dog, and large aquatic bird — who live in a vaguely Southeast Asian–looking forested coastal area that is quickly being submerged by rising waters. The movie is a Noah’s ark–like animated fantasy, in that the animals are an unlikely mix of domestic and wild creatures that hail from all over the world, from South America to Madagascar. As characters, however, they are strikingly realistic. They don’t speak any human language or make much noise (the film has no narration), and their movements and gestures are remarkably true to form for their species: the anthropomorphism that Disney and other Hollywood animators have made standard fare over the years is thoroughly downplayed.
For 85 minutes, director and co-writer Gints Zilbalodis proves to be a master storyteller. The action moves in and out of exotic locations with ease, and the animals interact normally with one another, squabbling over food, toys, and other aspects of survival in the woods or in a boat. The visuals are stunning. Zilbalodis’s style of computer animation has a paint-by-numbers simplicity to it, with backgrounds that are both photorealistic and fanciful, lit ethereally and with great depth. The animals’ personalities are unpredictable and complex, and though they seem to be more intelligent than they would be in real life, they move through the animated environment without an agenda — in the moment. I’ve never seen anything quite like Flow. It’s a remarkable achievement.
Flow won the Golden Globe for animated feature, and at the Oscars it’s also nominated for Best International Feature (the former “foreign-language” category). It probably won’t pick up the latter award because it’s up against live-action features like Emilia Peréz and I’m Still Here, but the nomination itself is indicative of how seriously the Academy is judging this animated film.
At the recent “Annie” awards, given by the professional Hollywood animators’ guild, Flow won the Best Writing award, even though it has no dialogue. The Best Feature prize went to a more conventional studio picture, DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot. That film, which is free to Peacock subscribers and streaming on AppleTV and Amazon, may well be the Academy’s choice on March 2 (the Globes, which opted for Flow, tend to skew European).
The Wild Robot draws on many classic family films, such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and WALL-E, and its main premise is familiar: a robot gains human emotions. It’s about Roz (voiced by Lupita N’yongo), an alien android who gets stranded in the wilderness on Earth. She’s programmed to please and serve, and the movie is essentially her story: when she figures out how to translate animal sounds into English, that’s what we hear.
Roz accidentally steps on a goose nest, destroying it, but one egg survives, and when the baby hatches, Roz sees it as her duty to raise and nurture it. That means teaching young Brightbill, as he comes to be known, to fly and eventually migrate with a flock of geese. Roz seeks help and advice in this mission, and assisting her, despite self-serving urges, is a fox, Fink (voiced by Pedro Pascal). When her alien home comes a-calling, Roz must choose between her adopted world or her programmed subservience. And though what happens is not exactly surprising, the journey is rich and entertaining.
The Wild Robot is directed by Chris Sanders, who was behind the equally moving How to Train Your Dragon. It’s one of three Oscar-nominated animated features with a female heroine: Flow is genderless, as far as I could tell, and the perennial Wallace and Gromit are a male buddy duo.
Which brings me to Pixar/Disney’s Inside Out 2, an animated film that turns the brain functions of a maturing young woman named Riley, a hockey enthusiast, into an adventure. (It’s free to Disney+ subscribers and streaming on AppleTV and Amazon.) In the 2015 original Inside Out, Riley was a child, and the dominating emotions inside her head were Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. In the sequel, an adolescent crew arrives at the brain’s control center: Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui. All the states of mind are color-coded with self-explanatory personalities: Anger, for example, is voiced by Lewis Black and is red and hotheaded; Ennui is purple, bored, and oh-so-French (Adèle Exarchopoulis). The battle between these two groups will determine Riley’s blossoming adult ethos. The big question: will Anxiety wreck everything?
The movie is a therapeutic life lesson that’s a bit sanitized. Where, for example, is Sexual Desire? The original idea of dramatizing psychoanalysis and neurology was fun and colorful, but the imagination here is running thin, and it all whizzes by without much impact. Pixar and Disney are Academy favorites, however, so, if Flow or The Wild Robot do not prevail, Inside Out 2 is the likely spoiler.
That leaves two stop-motion features, Memoir of a Snail and Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Memoir of a Snail is a bleak, almost Dickensian Australian film about the life of Grace Pudel and her twin brother, Gilbert, as recalled by Grace from the 1970s to the present. She and her brother were born in Melbourne to a mother who dies in childbirth and an alcoholic dad who dies when the twins are young children. They are separated in foster homes and grow up thwarted and/or abused, until, in her later years, the snail-obsessed Grace is able to throw off her shell and embrace life.
As only the second R-rated animated feature ever to be nominated for an Oscar, Memoir of a Snail is a dark horse in the race. But it’s filled with dystopian charm and cluttered-basement production values — a sweet, goth story that misfits of all ages will embrace.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is the latest episode of Nick Park’s quirky pair: Wallace the clueless inventor and Gromit his loyal, long-suffering mute dog. In this outing, Wallace buys a robot gnome, Norbot, who goes haywire (and multiplies, like Mickey Mouse’s broom in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”), entwining him and Gromit in a chase after a massive blue diamond that was stolen by the penguin mastermind Feather McGraw (returning from The Wrong Trousers).
Vengeance Most Fowl is hilarious, filled with slapstick pratfalls and sly British satire. But as the umpteenth outing of its clay-shaped heroes, there’s little that makes it memorable enough for an award. Even so, it’s 79 minutes of unmitigated joy that’s available for free (and exclusively) to Netflix subscribers.
So, there you have it. Whatever Oscar chooses, and no matter how sophisticated and grown-up your tastes, there’s a worthwhile viewing experience to be found in all.
