Back Row Thoughts – Animation Autumn-ation, Part 1

If you tuned in to the blog today hoping to see my review of Wicked for Good, all I can say is…

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
*deep inhale*
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

All jokes aside, I will see it eventually, but given the eight month advertising blitz for the first half of the movie last year and the five month campaign for the back half, I can safely assume that you don’t need my help assessing whether or not you’d watch the damn thing, and I’m not rewarding Universal with my money in the first weekend. There will be plenty of time next week or beyond, and given that no matter what happens it’s likely to get repeat nominations in Costume Design and Production Design, it’s certainly on the radar.

But it’s a different area of the upcoming Oscars battle that concerns us right now. On Friday, the Academy released their lists of eligible films for the Animated, Documentary, and International Feature categories. As I’ve noted many a time, it’s been my mission for quite a while to see all the submitted entries for Animated Feature before nominations come out in January, because while the field continues to grow (a record 35 approved pictures this year), there is still no shortlist to narrow things down. It also kind of feels like an off year for the medium, as several films I took in so far did not make the list, including some genuinely great ones. I get the sneaking suspicion that the contest is going to boil down to KPop Demon Hunters (I have softened on it a bit, but my criticisms remain) and Zootopia 2, and everyone else is just sort of getting out of the way.

As part of the quest, I’ve taken in six animated films this fall, and I’ll split the reviews into two batches. Some were festival fare, others commercial and mainstream, but these have all had a public release in the U.S. as of this writing. Of the 35 films up for the prize, somehow I haven’t even seen half of them yet, due to the aforementioned exodus of a good number of potential contenders. I’ll go into that in more detail when I post the list along with the Academy shortlists next month, but for now, suffice to say, I am confused.

Arco

I originally saw this as part of my coverage of the Mill Valley Film Festival, but it was finally released in theatres last weekend. In a bit of an odd distribution model, the film was produced by Netflix’s French division, but North American rights were obtained by Neon. It’s one of those entries that can get by on star power alone, as Natalie Portman (who lives in Paris full time) signed on as an Executive Producer, and the English dub cast is full of A-list talent.

The movie is a highly imaginative but largely safe children’s sci-fi adventure done in the anime style. In the distant future (something like the 30th Century by our calendars, no sign of any Futurama denizens), the young title character (voiced by Oscar Tresanini in French and Juliano Krue Valdi in English) is jealous that the rest of his family get to fly around using rainbow jumpsuits – they literally let you fly and appear in the sky as an actual rainbow – and explore the past via time travel gems built into the suits. He’s still too young to get his own flying license (he’s mentioned as being 10 years old but the minimum age is 12), and he can’t stand that he’s left alone in their Jetsons-esque house above the clouds while the rest of his kin get to meet dinosaurs and such.

One night, ambition and curiosity get the better of Arco, and he borrows his older sister’s suit for a test flight. Things naturally go awry, and Arco is transported much closer to our time, the year 2075. There he meets Iris (Margot Ringard Oldra/Roma Fay), a bright student who dreams of exploring the world, and in an endearingly silly aside, learning to talk to birds. She quickly befriends Arco and tries to help him return home. Iris is a bit lonely, as her parents (voiced in English by Portman and Mark Ruffalo), are constantly away on business, only communicating through hologram messages, leaving her and her infant brother to be raised by their nanny robot Mikki, whose voice is a clever blend of Portman and Ruffalo with a mechanical filter placed over it.

Antics ensue, with the pair being pursued by a trio of brothers, each of them wearing sharp triangular sunglasses and monochrome outfits to distinguish them. Voiced in English by Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea, they’re not so much antagonists or villains as they are comic relief. They apparently caught sight of Arco’s bounce through time when they themselves were young, and they’ve been obsessed with finding proof of what they saw ever since, despite decades of ridicule.

On the whole, the adventure is very light, though there are a few darker and dangerous moments, particularly a wildfire that threatens Iris and Arco as they go, forcing Mikki to pull out all the stops to rescue them. There’s also a hopeful message about environmental preservation thrown in for good measure. The animation is simply gorgeous, with director Ugo Bienvenu getting every last bit of mileage possible out of the color and lighting spectrum that a living rainbow could allow. I was also very impressed with the ending, as it goes in a direction I never imagined, illustrating the consequences for Arco’s impulsiveness for good and bad.

If there’s a flaw to be had, it’s that the film is a bit too brisk given the wealth of worldbuilding potential at its disposal. At a very quick 82 minutes, it feels like the adventure is over before it starts. So much could have been wrung from Iris’s angst, Arco’s curiosity, or even the role of androids in this society only 50 years from our present. For example, there’s an absolutely mesmerizing scene where Iris is in school learning about the solar system, and the whole classroom is turned into an immersive environment via projectors and computer imagery. However, as soon as you feel that joyous whimsy, the illusion is broken, Iris’s robot teacher scolds her for something, and we move on as if we didn’t just see something amazing. There’s leaving the audience wanting more, and then there’s just plain teasing us. There are several moments where we fall into that latter group, with so many elements begging to be explored and questioned for what they inspire but that are left hanging.

Still, I absolutely adored this. For a kiddie film, the characters are fleshed out just enough to care without getting distracted or going too far into the weeds, the visuals are dazzling, and there were a few moments of pure inner child joy. The biggest for me was that every time someone called out for Arco, I couldn’t resist mouthing “POLO!” in my seat.

Grade: B+

100 Meters

If you’re a fan of manga and anime, you know that just about any subject matter can be ripe for highly dramatic, long-form storytelling, including sports. There have been entire series devoted to swimming (Free!), diving (Grand Blue Dreaming), and even figure skating (Yuri on Ice). So it should come as no surprise that track and field has its own popular saga in the form of 100 Meters, which ran from 2018-19, and has now been adapted into a feature film.

The crux of the story focuses on a young man named Togashi (voiced primarily by Tori Matsuzaka in Japanese and Joe Zieja in the English dub) who has an innate talent at running the 100-meter dash. We follow him from his childhood, where he idolizes a champion runner named Nigami (Jun Kasama/Adin Rudd), to the arrival of an awkward transfer student called Komiya (Shota Sometani/Mark Whitten), whom Togashi befriends and trains, to their eventual rivalries as high school, college, and professional track stars.

The animation is, outside of the main competitions, fairly standard anime fare, which is not a knock at all. I absolutely love the art style, and have for most of my life. The film even distinguishes itself slightly by using more solid outlines and harsher, tighter, more angular forms to lend the proceedings a degree of grit. When the races are on, however, it’s a whole other dimension of awesome, with some incredible detail about the runners’ bodies and how they react and interact with the track itself. It’s really amazing stuff, especially if you’re like me and saw The Animatrix back in 2003, with the “World Record” segment that follows a similar story and style. The whole idea of reducing an entire universe to a 10-second sprint is really fun.

The problem here is two-fold. On the one hand, you could dismiss this as being derivative of that earlier work. It’s very easy to see the similarities. For the second, even if you don’t buy the first point, you can at least concede that there’s not enough story here for a fully-realized feature. “World Record” only lasted for a few minutes. This film runs close to two hours, and there are far too many asides and ancillary characters that we either invest in with no real payoff – Togashi’s track club teammates Asakusa (Rie Takahashi/Sam Philyaw) and Shiina (Yuki Tanaka/Glory Curda) – or other pro contenders meant to build suspense for the final races, but we only establish them in the final act, so there’s no reason to care about them – Zaitsu (Koki Uchiyama/David Cui Cui) and Kaidō (Kenjiro Tsuda/Matthew Waterson).

The meat of the story is between Togashi and Komiya, so every moment we’re not paying attention to them feels like wasted time, and it’s even more ironic considering the whole point of these characters is how fast they are. We also learn very little of substance about anyone other than Togashi, and even then, it’s more in line with the question of why he runs, which the film only explores on a surface level. Even Komiya as the main foil is given no real backstory or motivation other than wanting to go fast. So is he the secondary lead or Sonic the Hedgehog?

The visuals do a ton of heavy lifting for the plot, and on the whole the experience is still enjoyable. This just feels like something crucial was lost in the translation from manga to screen, and even then, you could just watch 10 minutes from The Animatrix to get the same rush if you really want it. I still give it a mild recommendation, but I get the feeling I’m just missing that runner’s high.

Grade: B-

Pets on a Train

I try to track down as many possible entrants as I can, which is why I took in this cheap, lazy import (the film is called Falcon Express in its native France), and what’s worse is that I needn’t have bothered, as the flick was ultimately not put forward to the Academy. There are a fair few that I was shocked to see omitted from the eligibility list. This was not one of them.

A lot was weirdly changed to bring this movie to the English-speaking world, and none of it for the better. Essentially this is a quasi-heist, quasi-action adventure, in which a raccoon confusingly named Falcon (voiced by Wyatt Bowen in English; I’m not bothering with the French cast on this one) helps a badger named Hans (Chimwemwe Miller) hack into the security systems of a passenger train, putting it on a dangerous collision course, with all of the animals trapped inside trying to escape. Falcon (born Maurice) took the job so that he could swipe the smorgasbord of food in the dining cart for his community of street animals, but was double-crossed by Hans, who is seeking revenge against a police dog who “put him away” called Rex (Tristan D. Lalla).

Just about everything about this is a ripoff of something WAY better, and for no discernable reason. The plot is basically Die Hard (you know, FOR KIDS!), complete with a villain named Hans, two outsiders named “Big Johnson” and “Little Johnson” (Annakin Slayd and Patrick Abellard), and a protagonist that’s just a carbon copy of Bruce Willis, though in this case it’s a double steal, as we’re not only aping John McClane but Falcon’s design is almost identical to RJ from the 2006 Over the Hedge movie, where he was voiced by Willis.

The rest of the menagerie is hardly worth mentioning, as they’re all one-note jokes, right down to the hippie guinea pigs, the turtle named Leo (also Bowen) and clownfish named Momo (Richard M. Dumont) who bemoan their lives as failed animal actors, and the effete greyhound (Terrance Scammell) who’s just a dated gay stereotype. From the moment Hans takes control of the train, I literally could not care less if all these creatures died in a fire, and that’s saying a lot coming from me.

We also, bafflingly, have an entire subplot about a pair of news anchors (Eleanor Noble and Bowen for a third time) who are so bored with local news that they try to use the runaway train crisis as a means to propel their careers to a national spotlight. By their designs, I’m guessing that they’re based off Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, but what kid would get the reference? More to the point, what French child would get it? Mind you, given that the title was changed for English-speaking audiences to be a half-assed nod to Samuel L. Jackson’s most famous cheesy, profanity-laden line, I’m guessing that no one on the localization team has kids or knows what’s appropriate for them.

The only saving grace the film has is the animation itself, which is appropriately thrilling when needed. The camera movements and choreography of the action scenes are actually quite well done, saving this flick from the basement by a considerable margin. I just wish it gave me anything to care about. The only real fault is that 3D CGI animation is terrible when it comes to lip flaps and dubbing. In a 2D film this wouldn’t be an issue, as the flat surface of animated mouth movements are typically very simple and uniform in their execution, so overdub dialogue can be written and paced to fit the motions. With 3D, the movements are more dynamic and detailed, so even if you write lines and time them right, you can still tell the character is making a “P” motion with their lips rather than an “A,” for example, and it takes you right out of the moment.

This is far from the worst film I’ve seen this year, but it’s by no means anything special. I’m genuinely amazed that a studio spent money to import it, and even more so that I shelled out $15 to see it. However, as mentioned earlier, I am not surprised it won’t be competing for the Oscar. It would be an embarrassment to see it on the list.

Grade: C+

***

That’s all for this edition. I’ll cover the rest next time around. And trust me, we have some genuinely great hopefuls waiting just around the corner.

Join the conversation in the comments below! Have you seen any of these films? Do you think they have Oscar caliber? Just how fast can you run the 100? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!