Justice for ‘Wolfwalkers,’ the Masterpiece that Should’ve Won Best Animated Feature at the Oscars
GKIDSGiven that Sunday’s Oscars ended on an Anthony Hopkins headshot and a genuinely shocking Chadwick Boseman snub, I won’t say that Wolfwalkers losing out on Best Animated Feature was the most egregious oversight of the evening—but it’s certainly up there.Going into Sunday night, Soul’s win already felt inevitable—so unavoidable, in fact, that pre-emptive pieces explained why such a decision would be disappointing. Soul, like most Pixar releases, is a gorgeous visual work, but its premise, in some ways, outdoes the execution. It’s the first film from the studio to feature a Black lead, but in a continuation of a pernicious trope, Jamie Foxx’s music teacher protagonist Joe Gardner spends most of the film as a dead, amorphous blob—that is, until he takes over the body of a cat. Soul also feels, in some ways, derivative of Docter’s earlier work, which uses corporate structures to make sense of the intangible and metaphysical aspects of human existence. (See: Monsters, Inc. and dreams, or Inside Out and the human mind.) But it’s not just the Oscars’ notorious default setting of awarding Pixar almost every chance it gets that makes Wolfwalkers’ loss to Soul so upsetting. It’s the fact that Wolfwalkers itself is a masterpiece—an imaginative and heart-rending story made all the more captivating by Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon’s meticulous and full-hearted embrace of its medium.Read more at The Daily Beast.
Read More
