Well, even though the winner is beyond obvious and nobody would really argue with the choice, we can speculate on why the Academy went with only three nominations instead of five this year, a year that had plenty of animated fare to choose from:
Despicable Me, Megamind, Tangled, Shrek 4, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole, My Dog Tulip, Bill Plympton's
Idiot's and Angels and the foreign
A Town Called Panic (which apparently wasn't eligible for the Oscars). There have been five nominees twice (including last year), and three nominees the other eight years.
I think
How to Train Your Dragon was fantastic, completely enjoyable, and up there with
Fantastic Mr. Fox as the best non-PIXAR animated movie released by a major Studio in many, many moons. I can see why the emotional impact of
Toy Story 3 makes it the more obvious choice for votes, but for anybody who didn't already see
Dragon with your kids, it is most definitely worth seeing and is not "just" for the under-ten set.
Also, even though it isn't going to win I am very happy that
The Illusionist was nominated. Haven't been able to see it yet, but I loved
The Triplets of Belleville (as I think everybody else on the planet did) and think the idea of animating an unproduced Jacques Tati script was fantastic!
Belleville was also nominated (the year
Finding Nemo won), and I am consistently impressed that a few of the foreign animated features keep making the cut...even if they don't have much chance of winning. And remember, to their undying credit, in just the second year of the award the Oscar did go to Hayao Miyazaki's
Spirited Away....though it should be noted there was no PIXAR entry that year. Nick Park's stop-motion
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit has also won this award, and
Persepolis, The Secret of Kells and Miyazaki's
Howl's Moving Castle have all been nominees (but they somehow snubbed
Waltz with Bashir, which was nominated as Best Foreign Language Picture).
The idea that anyone is going to vote for an animated feature that they haven't already put up for Best Picture, as the last two years have followed, is just plain unthinkable. It wrenches even an iota of drama from this category, but I guess that's just the way it is going to be.
For my money the only time they've obviously screwed the pooch in terms of what actually won here was in the award's first year, when
Shrek beat
Monsters, Inc. somehow. Objectively I think time will show which of those movies is the better and timeless, and while
Shrek made a zillion bucks and spawned ever-incresingly horrid sequels, even the original is not a very well made movie, animation wise or script wise. That's the only time I think popularity wrongly overwhelmed a clearly superior film.
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