For Wall-E, a different kind of metal?

By Steven Zeitchik

The Oscar battle for animated film was intense last year.

But it may be even more wild this year.

So wild, it may not even just be about best animated film anymore.

Ever since the best ani category was created seven years ago, the conventional wisdom is that no movie eligible for the category will ever work its way into the best picture race. ("Beauty and the Beast" was nommed, but that was in 1991, long before a separate category was created that siphoned off best pic votes.)

But Wall-E is getting serious critical acclaim, not to mention pop-cultural cachet, as film editor Gregg Kilday notes in his recent story. (Check out the THR review here.)

And while predicting Oscars in June is like predicting a World Series winner in February, this may in fact be the year that the Pixar set crashes the party.

People forecast that every year, you say? They said it with Ratatouille last year? Sure. But 2008 is different. Last year at this time Cannes had already offered a few frontrunners like "No Country," which wound up landing best pic. This year there are no obvious candidates so far (we're still not anywhere near sold on "Changeling").  

There will also be a lot fewer specialty releases overall - about 20% fewer, by the count of one recent exec --and thus less competition.

And Ratatouille, for all its polish, took on relatively modest themes like the subjectivity of taste. This one, set in the future but urgently about the weird and fraught path we're on today, is a clever metaphor about the hubris of human ambition, an environmentalist cri de coeur and a cautionary tale about the power of technology. Bigger stuff than what does or doesn't make for a good bouillabaisse.

There are also a lot fewer of the traditional Pixar touches -- no cartoonish villain or madcap child-friendly pacing -- that we suspect puts off some Oscar voters.

What's more, as well-reviewed as it was, "Ratatouille" trails even "Wall-E" when it comes to a critical Q rating; at 96% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, it's one tick higher than that film (and also higher than any best picture winner in nearly a decade).

There is the money problem -- contemporary wisdom, after all, says that when it comes to the Oscars, box-office is a bell curve; you can't earn too much or too little -- but given all the Oscar movies that didn't make money last year, there may be a sympathy vote to counteract that.

"Wall-E" isn't the only animated pic with an intriguing Oscar storyline. A film with Academy potential did get a bow in Cannes -- and it, too, wasn't live action. "Waltz with Bashir," Israeli Ari Folman's first-person animated docu in which he tries to reclaim blacked-out memories of his time fighting in the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war (it's not Rotoscoping -- he interviewed his subjects and then hand-drew them, so it feels more animated than actorly). We caught the movie in Cannes and it's a work of dreamlike poignancy, a rebuke against war even as it methodically tracks war's twists and turns.

At first glance, the SPC pickup follows in the footsteps of its previous arthouse animated faves which earned ani Oscar nominations, like "Persepolis" and "Triples of Belleville." But Bashir may have a few more swings of the bat -- it's the only pic that we know of that's ever been potentially eligible for best picture, best documentary, best animated and (assuming Israel puts it forth as its selection) best foreign film.

So the year is nearly half over, and among the few early Oscar contenders, two are animated movies. Maybe Andrew Stanton and the creators of "Wall-E" are right -- we do live in strange times.

Comments

[Dan Zee]

I thought Beauty and the Beast WAS the best film of 1991 and that The Incredibles WAS the best film of 2004, whether they got Best Pictures Oscars or not. Go Wall-E!