The Best Animated Feature Oscar race will certainly have a broad pool of techniques represented this year!
Having reviewed background materials provided by the filmmakers, the Films & Feature Animation Branch Executive Committee has officially qualified Dean Fleischer-Camp’s mockumentary Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Jason Loftus’ actual documentary Eternal Spring and Richard Linklater’s rotoscope-ish Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood for consideration.
The fact that all three films use live-action footage put a question mark next to their status in the 95th Academy Awards race. According to the Academy’s Oscar eligibility rules, animated features are
“… A motion picture in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique, and usually falls into one of the two general fields of animation: narrative or abstract … Motion capture and real-time puppetry are not by themselves animation techniques.”
” In addition, a narrative animated film must have a significant number of the major characters animated.”
Netflix original Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood marks Linklater’s return to animation after Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. Produced by Linklater’s Detour Filmproduction animation studio Submarine (Amsterdam) and Minnnow Mountain, the film captures the imaginative thrill of the 1969 Moon landing through the eyes of an average kid living in Houston. Glen Powell, Zachary Levi and Jack Black star.
Eternal Spring has won numerous film and documentary festival awards since premiering at Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival in March. It recalls the events and aftermath of March 2002, when a state TV signal in China was hacked by the religious minority group Falun Gong, setting off a wave of police raids and repression. Relating the experiences and evolving opinion of artist and comic-book illustrator Daxiong, who fled the violence for North America, the film combines present-day footage with CG animation inspired by the subject’s art.
Produced by Lofty Sky Entertainment, Eternal Spring is also Canada’s entry into the Best International Film Oscar competition.
Distributed by A24, the critically acclaimed feature extension of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (based on Fleischer-Camp’s hit short) stars an adorable one-inch-tall shell (voiced by Jenny Slate) and his grandmother Connie (Isabella Rossellini). Once part of a sprawling community of shells, they now live alone as the sole survivors of a mysterious tragedy. But when a documentary filmmaker discovers them in his Airbnb, the short film he posts online brings Marcel millions of passionate fans, as well as unprecedented dangers and a new hope at finding his long-lost family.
[Source: The Hollywood Reporter]
