Animation as a medium can be a wonderful and often
beautiful way to tell a story. It’s a shame that more filmmakers don’t use it. Here
in the United States animation tends to be thought of as a children’s medium
and it is generally used solely for such. Feature film animation was the
exclusive purview of Disney until the late 1990s when Pixar (acquired by
Disney) and DreamWorks started producing their own imaginative, though still
childish, films.
However, in recent years we’ve been seeing brilliant work
from foreign filmmakers who specialize in animation being recognized here and
almost every year since the inception of the Animated Feature Oscar, a foreign
film with adult oriented themes has been nominated. There’s been the dark
earth-toned work of Sylvain Chomet in The
Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist, the Iranian film Persepolis,
Waltz with Bashir from Israel. Two
years ago a little known (in the USA) Irish film called The Secret of Kells made the Academy’s cut and received a
nomination. This year they’ve gone outside the box again – the exclusion of
Pixar’s Cars 2 – and nominated two
films, one of which has not yet been released in the United States.
