Top 5 Fridays – Animated Films of 2009

Thanks to the continued success of Pixar, and the envy of every other studio with an animation department, this year at the Golden Globes and the Oscars will actually be a real horse race for best animated feature - and it might not even be Pixar in the top spot either.  

5. 9- There’s not much I can say about 9 that I haven’t said already, several times. Shane Acker’s feature-length expansion on his short film of the same name is so visually innovative, and it does what great animation should do: tells a story that couldn’t just as easily be told through conventional filmmaking. Much like with James Cameron’s Avatar though, the impressive imagery can’t completely compensate for a minuscule story. So for technical prowess, 9 rates up with the best, but with Pixar’s constant raising of the narrative bar it can’t do any better than 5th spot.

4. Fantastic Mr. Fox- To be completely honest, I haven’t actually seen this yet, but I think I can place this movie here by process of mathematical elimination. There’s no way it could be better than its stop-motion cousin Coraline, and there’s no way that with a story adapted from Roald Dahl’s book that it could be worse than the lightweight plot weaved for 9, and it certainly can’t compete with the technical and artistic superiority of Up. Makes sense to me. I’ll be the first to print a retraction if I realise I’ve made a mistake after watching it. Credibility preserved? Had none to begin with? Fine.

3. Up – I remember singing the praises of this movie when I first saw it, but that was before I laid eyes on some of the other offerings this year, and before I was able to give the matter some sober second thought while watching it with my daughter. Up was a beautiful film, the guys at Pixar really know what they’re doing from an artistic perspective, and the writers there are no slouches when it comes to putting together a compelling story – heck, their writing is the main reason that animation is taken so seriously these days. However, I’ve found after watching it at home that the story doesn’t quite work for younger children. There’s so much downtime, and a little too much subtext for the wee ones to clue in on. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be a big deal, animated films don’t all have to be appropriate for kids, but if that was their announced intention and they didn’t carry it out, then that comes off as a failure in my eyes.

2. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs – This was such a charming picture for so many reasons. It had a great voice cast, had a lot of great life messages in it for people to grow on, it made great use of 3D technology to give the atmosphere some real depth without being too showy, and it was totally funny all the way through. It also managed to nail the cross generational audience appeal that Up missed, making it a true family picture. For being so original, for coming from a team of animators that were virtually untested, for managing to cast both Bruce Campbell and Mr. T, and for being such a surprisingly good time, Meatballs snags the number 2 spot with authority.

1. Coraline- There were too many great elements going for this film for it not to do well, but it was that it became more than the sum of its parts that it rose above the rest to the top spot. Henry Selick practically reads Neil Gaiman’s mind to come up with this adaptation of a girl’s adventures into the darker realms of a spooky old house that tries to teach us the difference between the things we want and the things we need. I never thought I would be back on board for Dakota Fanning in a lead role, or with Teri Hatcher either, but they’re both perfectly cast to evoke the spirits of the precocious child and the worn out/Stepford mom. Selick demonstrates to us what a lifetime of expertise at stop-motion can create on a slate with infinite possibilities, and makes a strong case for animation studios to remember that CGI might not always be the best tool for the job.