93rd Oscars: If I Had a Ballot

What a year, huh?

In a normal year we would be somewhere between one to two months past the ceremony. This post would have already been done. I would be taking a break from slamming 20+ movies in a short time and questioning “why was this nominated?” but, you know, 2020 was not exactly a normal year.

For the first time since the 6^th Academy Awards in 1934, the ceremony covers films released in two calendar years. February was terraformed into the December of the Oscar season. And for the first time ever, films released exclusively to streaming qualified for the awards. I wonder if the pandemic and quarantine period meant more eyes on these movies? Maybe? There is really no way to know.

Still, there was plenty of great material to choose from even with the circumstances. Sure, the exclusions of One Night in Miami and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom raised an eyebrow, but at least Hillbilly Elegy managed to appear in the only categories it deserved. After last year’s aggressively white male dominated nominees, it was an exceedingly pleasurable change of pace to find so many worthy diverse choices among the nominees. About time the Academy paid attention to more films with BIPOC and/or female leads and stories that reflect the diversity of the American experience/experiment.

Best Picture
The Nominees: The Father, Judas and the Black Messiah, Mank, Minari, Nomadland, Promising Young Woman, Sound of Metal, The Trial of the Chicago 7 

As always, these nominees are ranked in a preferential ballot. Here is how I would rank the nominees:

1. Nomadland
2. Minari
3. Sound of Metal
4. The Father
5. Judas and the Black Messiah
6. Promising Young Woman
7. The Trial of the Chicago 7
8. Mank

I am specifically the person for whom a film like Mank was made. A black and white drama about the politics involved in getting Citizen Kane made, including appearances from the likes of Marion Davies, Ben Hecht, and Irving G. Thalberg? Sign me the fuck up! Yet I felt incredibly cool towards the final product. It was technically impressive but a bit unengaging to get through. The surfaces are all right there and in the right place, but the entire thing feels unbelievably hollow. Perhaps it is a bit of a remove from David Fincher’s filmmaking style that I have felt over the passing years. I still cherish earlier works like Seven, but do not feel much of anything towards later ones like Gone Girl.

The past is not just prologue in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 but a funhouse mirror reflection of the present political climate. Think of it as ACAB but in 1969, which is a bit of a reductive description of it, sure, but the meeting of political activism with authoritarian-like overreach recalls to mind the summer of 2020. If there are any major problems with the film, they are endemic to Sorkin’s work: a heavy focus on straight cis white males above all else, an awkward handling of BIPOC characters/stories, and a dearth of prominent female characters. There is also an incredible ensemble of actors tearing into juicy monologues, witty zingers, and showy bits of business with the all the relish you can imagine.

Promising Young Woman is a great setup that is frustrating by the various dangling threads that once pulled unspool to reveal the narrative as a series of “gotcha” moments. Provocative? Absolutely. Too clever by half? Definitely. Undone by inconsistent themes, tones, and character actions? Completely. The film is just too muddled: is Cassie a figure of cool as she cuts these men down to size or someone blighted and stuck in the past unable to move on? Did it ever cross Emerald Fennell’s mind that maybe someone acting as an avenging angel on behalf of someone else’s trauma may scan as icky? I get the intention of the casting choices of the men, but the wider point about the pervasiveness of misogyny and rape culture became patently obvious. Not to mention some of the dialog is grossly on the nose and completely lacking in nuance. The film poses unintended questions that it cannot be bothered with engaging or answering. While I liked it, just not enough. It is one of the more daring, if half-formed, films to contend this year.

Judas and the Black Messiah could not be more perfectly aligned for the current social and political moment. A work that demystifies, if not completely upends, the typical martyr syndrome of biopics, Judas gives energy, voice, and frustration to Black liberation stifled by white supremacy. Sure, the back section gets a little flabby, but it manages to not only stick the landing but provide a trio of performances that are absolutely sterling.

As someone who currently has a relative in the turbulent midst of dementia, The Father was a grueling viewing experience. Alternately harrowing, terrifying, and engrossed with a scrambling understanding/grasps of reality. The audience is thrust into the titular character’s decaying mental capacities and that palpable sense of unease makes for difficult viewing. Yet there is also beauty to be found in the two performances from Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman. Eventually, we will all be in her position first then his, which makes this drama even more potent and a sucker punch.

Imagine you have just been told that you are suffering from a degenerative loss of a sense that was tied to your identity. What would you do to gain it back and reintegrate your past with your present, if not your future? This is the central conceit of Sound of Metal, the story of a heavy metal drummer who learns he is losing his hearing, goes to live in a deaf community, and continually grapples with his inability to live with the present situation. There is so much more going on beyond that description, but that functions as the entry point to a deeply moving tale told with emotional restraint, empathy, and energy.

You gotta love the strangeness of certain voting bodies rules that dictate something American made and populated entirely with slices of Americana and chasing the dream as “foreign.” Minari is a glimpse into a piece of the American fabric that has not received as much attention prior to this. This is one of the warmest, loveliest films I have watched in recent memory. There is an authenticity to the depiction of childhood here that is refreshing, as is its glimpses into the struggles of assimilation and maintaining your roots. Never mistake its small scale and blissful serenity for being wafer thin as it hits with more power than you would expect.

Nomadland is a complicated stunner beneath its placid surface and quiet sound design. Yes, the American landscape can be a thing of vast and wonderous beauty, but these lives on the fringe are products of a decaying social safety net. It is also a sustained portrait of a woman’s grief reshaping her life repeatedly while trying to figure out a place to land. The horizon promises the fulfillment and healing of the itinerant lifestyles and echoing grief. The American dream may yet be achieved while traveling down these roads, or the eternal promise of it in the chase, at the very least.

 

Best Director
The Nominees: Thomas Vinterberg (Another Round), David Fincher (Mank), Lee Isaac Chung (Minari), Chloé Zhao (Nomadland), Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman)

First thing is first: the snubs. Was anyone truly surprised by the snub for Aaron Sorkin? His cinematic eye is not quite there yet, nor is his sense of editing, movement, or texture. I also was not shocked by Regina King whiffing in this category as the list of actors-turned-directors who get nominated, let alone win, on their first try is relatively small (and male). Maybe next time. Frankly, Shaka King, Florian Zeller, and Darius Marder were the shocking omissions. 

But let us get down to the actual nominees: David Fincher’s pastiche for Mank is a cool, detached technical marvel. Individual scenes are filled with wonderful senses of playfulness or intriguing emotional textures, but they never coalesce into a satisfying whole. For all the delightful scenes of Marion Davies, the only ones that truly pop, there are far too many that play at a remove.

Emerald Fennell shows a steady hand in guiding actors to performances of tremendous depth and complexity, and with wrapping it all up in candy coated gloss that is quite appealing. But the deemphasizing of revenge and suspense throughout for romantic comedy interludes can make the overall experience misshapen and cringe-inducing. Promising Young Woman manages to be both stylish and dire at the same time. How much of that was intentional remains up for debate. Fennell certainly has an eye for compositions that capture attention. I am intrigued to see where she goes next.

Lee Isaac Chung’s pastoral imagery throughout Minari only underscores the tenderness and warmth already undergirding the narrative. He manages to pull solid performances from the entire cast, including a child actor (Alan Kim) and a female-lead who deserved to be in the actress conversation (Yeri Han). His autobiographical lens and words make for a truly endearing and stunning coming-of-age narrative that reflects another corner of the vast immigrant experience in America.

Think of it as a Danish variation on Husbands, another excoriating glimpse into middle-aged masculinity in freefall. Thomas Vinterberg is the latest in a long line of the Academy’s flirtations with European talents, and it is a well-deserved honor. His camera is a neutral observer of the behavior on display. Another Round is also powered by an ambiguity and a stellar lead performance by Mads Mikkelsen, who deserved to be nominated damn it, and all of it is wrapped up by Vinterberg’s steady hand. And oh, what a magnificent final scene!

What Chloé Zhao manages to achieve with Nomadland is simply amazing. Not only does she manage to integrate two well-known actors with real life nomads, but she makes them nearly indistinguishable from each other, and wraps it all in a narrative structure that says loudly what bad faith criticisms say it does not. Only her third feature film and she is making works this robust, rich, and moving. What a career we can look forward to from this talent. (Can’t wait to see what does with MCU!) 

Best Actor
The Nominees: Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal), Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), Anthony Hopkins (The Father), Gary Oldman (Mank), Steven Yeun (Minari)

Call me crazy but I prefer Gary Oldman going too big or at an icy reserve and not in this prestige middle ground. Naturally, he won his Oscar for this middlebrow type of acting and film style a few years back over competition that excavated more interesting terrain. His alcoholic smartest guy in the room is something of a twinning image of the not-so-great fallen man in Citizen Kane. Oldman is serviceable in the role, but I can think of several performances I preferred over this one. 

If I hear one person claim that Anthony Hopkins is just “acting like an old person,” I am going to lose my mind. What he does is so intelligent and complex that dismissing it as an age-related breeze through a script is a major disservice. Hopkins must present a man whose mental acuity is flailing around looking for something to grasp while it all dissolves around him. He is brilliant and completely devastating in the part. Place this one right next to Silence of the Lambs and Remains of the Day as his greatest hits.

Frankly, it was hard to choose between Riz Ahmed, Steven Yeun, and Chadwick Boseman. The three of them deliver such nuanced, beautiful work in films that I found rich and rewarding. Let us discuss Yeun first. His father in Minari is blinkered by his drive to succeed and grasp his slice of the American dream at all costs, and by extension, fails to see how his obsessive qualities are slowly decaying the family unit. The real revelation is Yeun’s layered acting and his ability to project emotions through tiny displays of body language and vocal intonations. I cannot wait to see what else he is capable of showing us since I mainly knew him up to this point from voice work in the Tales of Arcadia franchise and what little of The Walking Dead I have seen. 

So much of the power of Riz Ahmed’s performance as a former heroin addict dealing with a newly destabilizing force in his life is compressed into his large doe eyes. Even when trying to act nonchalant about his escalating deafness or trying to convince everyone else that he is fine, his eyes communicate a vulnerability and terror lurking just beneath the surface. Ahmed is never showy but instead calibrating his performance to show urgency, to demonstrate how addictive the past and portions of the identity can be when stripped away. The final lingering shot of his face is a quiet marvel that reminds us of how intimate the movie camera can be.

Known primarily for playing real-life and fictional Black superheroes, Chadwick Boseman displays a liveliness, playfulness, and cocksure roguishness that were never even a twinkle in his best known (and beloved) roles in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. His trumpeter dreaming of something bigger but functioning as a ticking timebomb of self-destructive impulses is a stunner. His contradictory impulses are magnetic to watch and he gives even his quietest scenes a powder keg intensity. What a final bow for an actor that was just reaching the prime of his talents.

Best Actress
The Nominees: Viola Davis (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), Andra Day (The United States vs Billie Holiday), Vanessa Kirby (Pieces of a Woman), Frances McDormand (Nomadland), Carey Mulligan (Promising Young Woman)

It is hard to focus on just Vanessa Kirby’s acting in Pieces of a Woman instead of also bringing in the wider scope of the film, but I am going to try. Even when the film makes the characters say explicitly what we tacitly keyed into, Kirby gives a naturalistic performance as a woman in a fugue state. Her restraint is remarkable, even when the script gives her a pat courtroom scene to wrap up it all up, and she never gives into the histrionics that the screenplay would easily afford. Kirby is transcendent in a movie that fails to meet her conviction/talent.

Even when the script flounders, Carey Mulligan walks away with one of the most daring, combustible, and adventurous performances nominated in this category for quite some time. Her control over her duplicity and sociopathic behaviors is a marvel of minimalism having a maximum impact. We know that her character is obsessed, possibly to the point of derangement and lunacy, but Mulligan never plays her character in broad strokes. The iron behind her eyes as she returns the gaze of men threatens to ignite the screen and us right along with it.

What is most enthralling about Frances McDormand in Nomadland is how engaging she makes listening look. Yes, she gets plenty to say and do, but so much of the movie rests on her ability to blend into the nomadic lifestyle. She never steals the moment from her non-pro scene partners but seemingly opens a space for them to speak without judgment or her stepping and hogging the light. McDormand is a seasoned pro (two Oscars, two Emmys, a Tony) and still capable of surprising us with her depth and ability to simultaneously project hardness and warmth.

The two performances that I loved the most were the famous jazz singers. Who knew? Typically, I am not the biggest fan of “celebrity is playing dead celebrity” as a means of prestige. It can feel easy, cheap even, as a form of lazy mimicry and often rewards lackluster performances with residual good will from the portrayed. But Viola Davis and Andra Day are not giving into that mannerism in the slightest.

First, there is Viola Davis in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom as the titular singer. She is nearly unrecognizable beneath the body padding, gold teeth, extreme makeup, and her completely different way of carrying herself. I have long praised and been intoxicated by her ability to transform into whoever she is playing, but even this is a stunner. Davis must simultaneously play the real Ma Rainey and the prima donna version, sometimes alternating between the two of them between lines or in the pauses of breath. Size queens will complain about her screen time, but her presence looms over the entire proceedings and empower the narrative much like Virginia Woolf, Hannibal Lecter, or Queen Anne, to name just three Oscar winning leads with brief screen time.

But my heart and theoretical vote belong with Andra Day giving one of those astonishing debut performances that promise more potential greatness to come. Not only does she sing the infamous Billie Holiday songbook, but she manages to make the texture of her voice change as the story progresses through time. The flintiness and weariness evident in the younger Holiday’s eyes and carriage only grows stronger so that by the end, Day’s Holiday is but a hollow, bitter shell of her former self. It is a truly remarkable work that elevates and distinguishes itself from Lee Daniels’ overindulgent, half-baked, and kitsch directing style. But man, can he get some truly great work from his actors. I cannot wait to see what she does next.

 

Best Supporting Actor
The Nominees: Sacha Baron Cohen (The Trial of the Chicago 7), Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah), Leslie Odom Jr (One Night in Miami), Paul Raci (Sound of Metal), LaKeith Stanfield (Judas and the Black Messiah)

The incredibly petty part of my brain is just so happy to not see Jared Leto’s bizarre, heavily mannered performance in The Little Things break into the nominees. I have been very open about my distaste of his performance style, a thinly veiled excuse for being an asshole under the auspicious of Method acting, being something that I find unconvincing. After popping up at the Globes and SAGs, it is refreshing to see him whiff here for so mannered a performance.

In better news (if dubious category placement): LaKeith Stanfield! While I would have placed him in the lead category, as the entire story is clearly told from his point-of-view, it is still nice to see so sterling a performance finally gain traction. I suppose one could argue that Judas contains two lead performances or two supporting performances, depending how you look at it. Either way, he deservedly got in here and it was a pleasant surprise.

While I am a convert to Regina King’s debut, I am far more enamored with Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Malcolm X, the true center of this film, than I am with Leslie Odom Jr.’s Sam Cooke. No disrespect to Odom Jr.’s very fine work, including having to sing several of the more famous numbers in Cooke’s discography, but Ben-Adir manages to make Malcolm X both politically strident, deeply vulnerable, and boyish in his camaraderie. But perhaps I am being unfair to Cooke/Odom Jr. as so much of the film is about his wrestling with not being able to merely be himself as an artist but a symbol, a “credit,” and taking pride in turning a white man’s capitalistic game into his own money-making endeavor. One Night in Miami is frankly populated by four performances that deserved the recognition. I loved watching all of them work even if one of them grabbed me a little more than this one. (Good on him for becoming the fourth person, and first man, to be dually nominated for acting and songwriting in a given year.)

It is hard to signal out any performance in so strong an ensemble as Trial of the Chicago 7, but the conventional wisdom cohered around Sacha Baron Cohen’s merry prankster that is undergirded by a vulnerability shocking to the performer. His puckish behavior is given more color and form than what one would think on paper, or given his history as Borat, Ali G, and Bruno. He also makes for a great buddy pairing with Jeremy Strong’s stoner going big and for broke. Who knew Cohen had such restraint in him? It is a wonderful performance and I’m not mad about his nomination.

Paul Raci’s so believable and muted that it is hard to believe that he is not actually this person on screen. His stillness on screen communicates so much and what colors the emotional textures of his scenes with Ahmed is the minute change in body language. He is a sturdy rock of empathy, serenity, and tough love throughout Sound of Metal that you wonder just where he has been hiding all this time. Turns out, he is a character actor finally getting his due.

There is something difficult about discussing just what Daniel Kaluuya is doing in Judas that makes his acting so good. You never catch him calculating a choice or a movement. From the first time we meet him until his final scene there is just a sense of being. His charismatic delivery of reams of dialog, often in ecstatic monologues, with an ease that would make you follow him into Bedlam. The fact that the season has zeroed in on him as the presumptive winner is no shock and the honor is well earned. 

Best Supporting Actress
The Nominees: Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), Glenn Close (Hillbilly Elegy), Olivia Colman (The Father), Amanda Seyfried (Mank), Yuh-Jung Youn (Minari)

Sigh, my kingdom for a nomination for Dominique Fishback for the scene where she reads a poem to Kaluuya alone. Oh well, two shocking nominations were not in the cards for that film. Well, let us get to the nominees then, and first up is Amanda Seyfried’s energizing work in Mank. She, and the part, bring a humanizing quality to Marion Davies, an unintended casualty of Citizen Kane’s poison pen. Her Brooklyn accent comes and goes, but there is one truly astonishing scene where Davies and Mank wandered off around the palatial estate cracking jokes, getting drunk, and establishing a human connection amongst all the austere dramatics on display. 

Oscar has a habit of comedic amnesia, so it is a pleasant surprise to watch Maria Bakalova sail through all the precursor awards to this deserved nomination. Bakalova does not merely match Sacha Baron Cohen’s energy but perhaps surpasses his comedic brio. Not only does she make a fool out of Rudy Giuliani before the rest of 2020 caught up with that shit-show, but her period reveal at a debutante ball had me squirming and laughing. No one else in this category commits quite as hard as her, and I am pleased to see comedy get its due.

I am going to try to keep my thoughts about Hillbilly Elegy as a movie to a minimum and say that Glenn Close does incredible work elevating myopic material. Close gives her character a gait, vocal style, and mannerisms that reflect a hard-lived life and grit forged through suffering and surviving. She also manages to deliver some whoppers with enough ferocity and truth to make them feel like something approximating honesty and reality. If she does finally win the Oscar: it would not be undeserved (despite the movie as a whole); it would come in a year like this; on her eighth try.

The rematch for all the diva worshipers in film fandom: Olivia Colman vs Glenn Close. I kept going back-and-forth between the two of them the last time around. A coin flip ended up on Close, but I was thrilled with Colman’s upset as her broad-yet-nuanced work in The Favourite remains a delight. She is so muted and controlled in The Father, so subtle, that the prior performance feels like it was given by an entirely different actress. Her interior panic manifests behind her eyes despite the struggling to keep it together exterior as she watches her father’s mental fragmentation. She has the range.

Yuh-Jung Youn gets a potentially showy role in Minari and instead breathes life into it by playing it straight. She never overdoes the quirks of the grandmother, nor does she overplay the eventual stroke complications. Everything she does feels realistic and like someone you have encountered in real life. Youn is a legend in Korean cinema, and she gets a juicy role in an American film. Veterans getting their chance to shine is always a welcome experience for me, and I just adored her work.

 

Best Screenplay – Adapted
The Nominees: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, The Father, Nomadland, One Night in Miami, The White Tiger

For all the turbulence that The White Tiger gives its subject matter, it is ultimately undone by the central device that undermines so many movies before it: voiceover narration. That is a trickery thing to pull off under the best circumstances, but this one often has its main character explicitly state what it already evident or describe it in clunky metaphors that feel more like literary devices that could have easily been excluded in the transition to the screen. There is still plenty of class commentary and Dickens-meets-Pinter twists that elevate the material, but I wish more of White Tiger had that same verve.

I was in college when the first Borat film was released and had to deal with an onslaught of douchey types endlessly repeating “my wiiiifffeee!” and “wawaweewa.” All of this is to say that I am not the target audience for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm as I find much of Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy a strange combination of smart satire and edgy try hard. Having said that, I found the sequel far better than the original due in part to the political climate of America feeling better attuned for Cohen’s style. Several sequences whiff out before the scene ends, and some of the comedy has lost its teeth as though Cohen has calmed with age. Happens to us all. Still, it is always nice to see the stodgy Academy embrace comedy.

The problem with One Night in Miami are the parts that feel grafted on to “open up” the play. Episodic introductions of each of the four primary characters waver in quality, which is the same thing that happens during the climax where Sam Cooke sings “A Change is Gonna Come” over a montage. But the film finds its footing when the original text finally gets rolling and the four actors are left to bounce off each other.

The success and depth of feeling found in Nomadland is a wonder of directorial achievement working in simpatico with a stellar lead performance. That is to say, the script feels somehow shaggy and stitched together, more improvised, and episodic than carefully plotted out. This is not a knock against the film, which is a sustained mood piece, but the strongest part of it is because it is not locked into a strict narrative it can breathe and move with a fluidity that is gripping. None of this takes away from its writing, but the whole doesn’t feel like a writer’s achievement.

Writers adapting their own work is often a slippery conceit. Just because they know what works in one medium does not mean they will know what works in another, but praise goes to Florian Zeller for not only adapting his stage play but turning in a fine directorial achievement. The Father approximates the character’s dementia progression and slippery connection with reality with disturbing ease and a distinct lack of melodramatic schmaltz or gooey sentiment. It is honest in its depiction, and that makes it even more emotionally engaging, devastating, and frightening.   

 

 

Best Screenplay – Original
The Nominees: Judas and the Black Messiah, Minari, Promising Young Woman, Sound of Metal, The Trial of the Chicago 7

Sorkin’s Trial of the Chicago 7 is a merger of two of his favorite writing styles: the courtroom drama and the argumentative idealism versus realism of politics. Think of it as A Few Good Men and a strong episode of The West Wing smashed together to provide evergreen dialog between fractions of liberal ideology in front of overreactive conservatism. Yet it never coheres into an entirely satisfying whole as the ending betrays much of what has gone before by feeling like a rousing movie-of-the-week. Still, there’s power to the immediacy of its thematic material that pushes through the more awkward passages. 

Much has been written about the ending of Promising Young Woman, and with good reason as it is endemic to the flaunts and unwieldly nature of the film. What, exactly, are we to gleam from her posthumous text messages? They cheapen the impact, but so much of preceding narrative has already proven obvious, uneven, and tonally whiplashed. Yes, Fennell shows promise here, but maybe stopping a movie cold to become a screwball comedy with an obvious red flag waving in the distance wasn’t the best choice. I enjoyed the movie up until the third act, but as someone described it on Letterboxd: “Gaslight. Gatekeep. Girlboss.”

Judas and the Black Messiah does evenly split its narrative between both the revolutionary cut short before his time and the man who betrays him thereby effectively complicating the typical martyr narrative. It provides ample room to understand and get to know both of their personalities and motivations. Much like Trial, it gets a little flabby towards the end in spots, but there is a white-hot rage and intelligence that pierces throughout every aspect of the film, including its screenplay.

It is the refusal to make a “feel good” movie about overcoming adversity that gives Sound of Metal so much of its power. The fear swirling behind our main character’s eyes is palpable, as is his understandable chase of a surgery that is not the guaranteed solution to his problems. The past is eternally prologue and forever ensconced out of reach. The gulf between what was and what is takes on a hard-earned eloquence as the final moments wash over you. Truly, I look forward to where Darius Marder’s next films take us.

Minari is such a quiet, tender movie that it would be far too easy to ignore the strength of the script which requires every actor to pull their weight to get the point across. It is not just a film about an immigrant experience, but one about the difficulties of being stranded between the two worlds, in finding the American dream, and the perseverance against the harshness of the landscape. I was absorbed from the first minute straight through and found many of the narrative twists intriguing for how they refused to cave to the prescribed notions of “prestige” cinema. In a year that was emotionally draining, anxiety-producing, and exhausting, Minari offered a soothing balm, and I was grateful.

 

Best Animated Feature
The Nominees: Onward, Over the Moon, A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon, Soul, Wolfwalkers

You know, I do not know where it is written down that so many animated fables must be musicals, but we should really revisit that. Over the Moon’s songs do not add much and prove largely forgettable. Much better is the breakneck, go-for-broke sense of visual design and execution which presents a highly imaginative fantasy world ruled over by a moon goddess who deserves better than the pat narrative that forces her into a grandiose reflection of the heroine. There is plenty to like about Over the Moon, but there is also plenty that feels like lukewarm Renaissance Disney.

I always welcome the chance to spend some time with an Aardman film, so mark me down as someone who found A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon as pleasant. There is the warm, artisanal humor and quality of the animation, which is to be expected. Yet it all feels a bit padded as though a television script was elongated with too numerous to count references of various science-fiction films and shows. That sense of padding is something that hampered the first film. It is still a very charming, fun, funny, sweet, and cute movie, but Shaun the Sheep is second fiddle to Wallace and Gromit for me.

Disney/Pixar are the Rolls Royce of American animation studios, while also greedily buying up competition and franchises at a rate that is alarming. Sure, they have made the likes of Onward and Soul before, and possibly even better, but they are still reliably solid and enchanting. Onward may not distinct itself away from the house style, but it does demonstrate the consummate artistry and control of depth, light, shadow, and distinct emotional expression. Yes, the story is pat, some of the episodic beats are better than others, but there is still a joy to be found in its combination of the mundane and the fantastical.

While Soul is not quite the retread of Inside Out its initial premise scanned as, but it is also not the heartbreaker that one was. Soul is far better in demonstrating and encapsulating the transformative and engaging power of art. In this case, it is the jazz music that the main character seemingly has in his, well, soul. This affection tribute to the arts is one of Pixar’s greatest short films, but then the narrative keeps going and the entire thing transforms into a spiritual plane and things get slipperier during a body swap. The interior logic of the film goes wonky, but the laughs keep coming and it is overall a very touching endeavor. So much of Soul is about one man’s midlife crisis that I am not sure how a younger audience would welcome this film by the end, but it is an overall transcendent adult experience.    

From the first frame straight through to the last I was transported and thoroughly engrossed in the visual world of Wolfwalkers, the latest from Tomm Moore and Cartoon Saloon. Another Celtic fable combining historical events with heaping doses of magic and mysticism, this is undoubtedly the best animated film of 2020. Hell, it is one of my favorite films I watched for this cycle. The visions of the world from the lupine form of the heroine are some of the strongest, most invigorating animated sequences to come along in a while. Well, probably since Moore’s last film, Song of the Sea, another pictorial narrative that played with perspective and owed more to wood blocks, tapestries, and illuminated manuscript as visual cues than anything else. Truly, a wonder of the mythic imagination. 

Well, there you have it. See everyone next year! (Can you believe it will only be about ten months between then and now?)