Great Animation of the Decade: Shrek; Incredibles; Fantastic Mr. Fox

Posted by Jason Ihle | No Comments

It’s been a hell of a decade for animated feature films, particularly 2009 which saw 5 nominees in the Oscar category (2 traditional hand-drawn cel animation; 2 stop-motion; 1 CGI). Here I offer you another 3 films to continue my list.

Pixar has absolutely dominated kicking off the decade with Monsters, Inc. and then moving on to the incredibly popular and very funny Finding Nemo. Next came The Incredibles (after the jump) and Cars (unseen by me). Then three years in a row they’ve won the Oscar with Ratatouille, the brilliant WALL-E (mentioned in my first post) and finally Up.

Shrek (2001) dir. Andrew Adamson and Joe Stillman – I thought this was so funny when I saw it. It’s simply a brilliant send-up of the (mostly) Disney animated films that involve beautiful women being saved by valiant princes. That’s the first thing that gets turned on its head as we’ve got a slovenly ogre entrusted to save the princess, who turns out to be an ugly ogre herself! It’s got some brilliant throwaway bits like Gepetto trying to pawn off Pinocchio to the poor boy’s protestations, “I’m not a puppet, I’m a real boy!” The movie hooked me when Fiona is singing a duet with a songbird (at which point I wondered what kind of hell I’d walked into) until the bird explodes from the impossibly high note she sings. Genius! I loved it.

The Incredibles (2004) dir. Brad Bird – Feature film animation got so damn good the last decade with Pixar blossoming into a brilliant animation studio. This was their best film since Toy Story 2 with a really smart screen story and hilarious and wonderful set pieces and fantastic voice characterization from Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Jason Lee and Samuel L. Jackson. And it had some hilariously brilliant notes like this.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) dir. Wes Anderson – The most remarkable thing I found about this stop-motion animation, based on the Roald Dahl book, was how it still carries the director’s signature touches. The art direction and the costumes immediately signify a Wes Anderson film. It’s got really great voice characterizations by George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman and other lesser-known names. The story moves briskly along and is greatly aided by a wonderful Alexandre Desplat musical score.

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