The Best Animation "Snub", a closer look:

Best Animated Feature transcends the superficial “is the movie good or bad” system. We’re talking Best, all of the nominees should be good and, in this year’s case, they really are. So, lets move past 'good v. bad' and look at the craft.

In the case of animation, the most admirable aspect is the meticulous detail. The technical side of things. What casual viewers seem to overlook while watching an animated feature is that everything in the frame is designed and created by hand. The characters. The clothes. The background. The lighting. The textures. The colors. The light. And, most importantly, the movement and innovation.

An animated film really comes together when all of these details push the characters, story and atmosphere forward. But, with this genre specifically, it’s a spectacular thing to witness breakthroughs in technique, style and visual storytelling that nobody’s seen.

It is in all of these fields that The Lego Movie was clearly outshined. Here’s why:

Anyone who’s ever dabbled in in 3D animation knows that the most difficult part of modelling is keeping the objects from looking like flat chunks of hard plastic. In most 3D programs, you can make a plastic shape with the click and drag of a mouse. It’s when you have to mold and incorporate texture that the difficulty is raised exponentially. Hair, fabric, leaves, dragon scales, vinyl robots,... you name it. Then, to rig and animate such things into believable movements and weight that exist in a living environment, this is when the real magic is made.

Lets consider the nominees.

Most assume that Song of the Sea and Tales of Princess Kaguya both profit off of 2D films always being the foreign/indie/underdogs, but it’s not out of pity that these films got their nomination. They earned their noms out of sheer hard work, persistence and beauty, just as the other nominees did. 2D is the ultimate detail oriented art form. 24 frames per seconds of hand-crafted pictures. A time consuming and expensive approach that always produces a product more elegant and nurtured than I’ve seen in any 3D feature to date.

Aside from the 2D niche, this technique offers notable style. When was the last time a 3D feature had a distinguishable flair that was distinct to a single director? Sure you can tell a Pixar film from a Dreamworks films, but the pattern within those realms are constantly straying into sameness.

Take the non-3D auteurs of recent years; the Henry Selick’s, Sylvain Chomet’s and Hayao Miyazaki’s of the world. Unique. Scrupulous. Memorable. Princess Kaguya and Song of the Sea hold to this tradition of idiosyncrasy and distinguishable vision. Their recognition is rightfully earned.

Then comes Boxtrolls. Stop motion is one of the more frustrating art forms to execute but has one of the most rewarding payoffs. It takes on much of the difficulty and tedium of 2D and then multiplies the problems. When you consider the weeks of work that potentially go into one single shot, making a sculpture come to life is a satisfying feeling (to say the least).

The other impressive feat of stop motion films, like Boxtrolls, is how they’re executed. In 2D animation you usually use the old technique of key drawings, breakdowns, inbetweens, etc.:

Time: |-----------------------------------------------> Frames: |A|---|B|---|C|---|D|---|E|---|F|---|G|---|H|---|I|--->

So, in 2D (traditionally), one guy will often draw key drawings (A,E,I), another animator will do breakdowns (C,G), and a team of others will do the inbetween fillers (B,D,...). All together, thousands of drawings later, this pattern will create one comprehensive shot. Single frame problems are then easy to isolate. If drawing D sucks, take it out, do it again. No need to trash everything.

In Stop Motion, it’s a little more like this:

Frames: |A|----------------------------->|Z|

One guy/team, works forward. No going back. One screw up means back to square one, or at least A LOT of added time to fix the problem in post.

Add in the other obstacles of filming (lighting, sculpting, molding,...) and this is why stop motion is one of the most risky, yet rewarding, styles of animation. Animators realize the hurdle that this is and recognize the courage it takes to use this technique for a feature length film. Boxtrolls really deserves its praise on this merit alone.

So, that’s three films, all pushing the the art of animation forward and worthy of recognition. This brings us to the 3D; Disney v. Dreamworks:

Admittedly, I’m not much of a Dreamworks supporter. Back in 2010, How to Train your Dragon was the first one of their movies I actually found merit in; Great character design and, with the assistance of the great Roger Deakins, a visual world that seemed to lunge 3D forward a new territory. How to Train your Dragon 2, though inferior to the first in many ways, doesn’t quite lunge but manages to stumble forward. Between hair, water, skin, metal, the texture mapping was superb. The variety of unique dragons and a well-crafted, colorful world may not have pushed the narrative any further ahead, but it was a very pleasant place to live for 2 hours.

But this year, once again, Disney outdoes Dreamworks.

Admittedly, I’m not the biggest supporter of Disney either, but they hit it right from time to time. 2014 was one of their hit years.

With Big Hero 6, Disney has really raised the bar on three other aspects of 3D animation: lighting, moving parts within a frame, and modelling/texture. Examine a frame like this. Aside from composition, you have:

• A depth of vision with moving parts near and far.


• Array of texture and detail, from electrical wires, to traffic lights, to scuffs on the curb,....


• Believable sunlight. (Another difficult thing to achieve). But it’s not just daylight of this scene. It’s the Glow, the Color, the City and how that light interacts with the other objects in the scene.

It’s a world of ideas in one still frame. To examine the moving parts (you know, the thing that makes an animation an animation) you’d have to explore waves of microbots, multiple choreographed fight scenes, and an entire living, breathing city. The intricacies are abundant, and vastly outdo the empty, much more bland approach in last year’s Frozen.

To me, the slightly contrived plot of Big Hero 6 is counter-weighted by all of these elements. San Fransokyo might possibly be THE most beautiful 3D city put on screen.

Lastly, do you remember earlier when I mentioned that the difficult part of 3D is making the models not look like chunks of plastic? This is one area where Big Hero 6 separates itself from the rest: Enter Baymax.

Not only is Baymax an irresistibly adorable character, but he’s a technically groundbreaking one. The Baymax deflation scene is not only one of the most complex, and funniest, scenes of the year. It sells the gravity/weight, it sells an authentic vinyl texture of Baymax, all while capturing the personally and mannerisms in movement. And that’s just one moment of many.

All five of these nominees are strong contenders.

Now, The Lego Movie naturally used some of these animation techniques, but too much came up short in evolving animation in any capacity (especially when compared to the nominees). The character models and their movements were already outlined. The hard/flat texture of lego, very easy to achieve. The editing, loud and fast, not giving the audience time to see and enjoy what makes animation special. These are just some of the areas where The Lego Movie was outshined.

To call it a snub, I think, is to misinterpret. All of the nominees deserve respect, because they’re really marvelous in some capacity. If I know animators, all of these technical elements were what they took a close consideration to when picking the nominees, and rightfully so. The award is for Best Animated Feature, meaning the animation should come first and foremost. So, feel free to argue ‘good v. bad’, but I fail to see a snub when the best Animated films of the year, truly got their recognition for once.