When the limelight is reserved for seats in single digits, there’s a good chance that equally deserving candidates are likely to miss out on the musical chair of the Academy Awards.
Oscars animated movies 2023 list featured good names, and as personally expected, Guillermo del toro’s Pinocchio bagged the award. This piece aims to inform you of good content that escapes the radar. So, here are a few suggestions that make a fantastic watch time.
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Bombay Rose
Bombay Rose is an essential milestone in the Indian animation industry. Indian animation nostalgia is deeply rooted in feature-length movies from Disney, anime, and later from shows on Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and other channels.
A generation grew up watching anthropomorphized animals and human-like characters that largely resembled white people. The tiny fragments of relatable Indian animation were felt through Meena or Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama.
Bombay Rose by Gitanjali Rao stands on its own story and art style. It picks up a non-European color palette, the regular brown people of India, their dreams, aspirations, and everyday life. The movie is also fresh as it doesn’t shy away from representing the daily struggle of people who are audacious enough to love outside their religion or legal sexualities. Gitanjali Rao also touches upon the historical stories, battles, and longings of human beings – present and past, and has weaved a story that would take a mature soul to grasp fully.
The House
My mind is periodically boggled at the relatively tiny audience who have watched The House. A stop-motion horror film from a London-based studio, The House was released on Netflix as an anthology.
It depicts three stories across timelines and a house that acts as the connecting thread. This film is a stop-motion perfection with a ridiculous amount of attention to detail to make it a cohesive piece.
Be warned! The House will not make immediate sense and will demand a second or even a third watch to grasp fully. The creators have meticulously used wording, music, sets, puppet fabrications, and creative ingenuity to showcase modern terrors.
The Summit of the Gods
How often does one come across an amalgamation of art styles from two different corners of the world?
French animation and Japanese anime have their audiences, each with its identifiable signature. The Summit of the Gods, or Le Sommet des Dieux, is a French-language anime based on the manga by Jiro Taniguchi and Baku Yumemakura.
The anime traverses through Japan’s streets and Kathmandu’s gullies as Fukumachi Makoto’s quest deepens to find out if there were possible claims of Everest before the official documentation. Investigative and fictional, The Summit of the Gods explores the veins of elite climbers who risk it all to view the world from its highest peak. Brimming with some of the stunning visuals of mountains, this film offers a microscopic gaze at the technicalities, aspirations, and dangers of mountaineering.
April and the Extraordinary World
French animated movies are some of the finest in the world and also the ones least accessible. So, I’ve watched April and the Extraordinary World only once via downloaded non-traditional means.
April is the protagonist and is on her way to saving humanity with a secret formula. This French-animated-steampunk-delight single-handedly destroys the lack of no-nonsense female leads. With the theme of an alternate history where the world never moves beyond steam and coal, we get to see some of the most creative interpretations of this world in a modern-ish set-up. This film also reminds me of Ghibli– a girl with a talking cat, a house that grows legs and moves, and robots.
April and the Extraordinary World did make it to the nomination list for Oscars 2016 but barely resurfaced as a recommendation except for a few quirky corners of YouTube. This film is available on YouTube Movies in select countries.
Tokri
Ending this piece as I began – Indian animation. Tokri is a short, stop-motion animation by a Mumbai-based studio whose work I’ve been following for some time.
The aforementioned Indian animation nostalgia is also composed of creative ads and characters like ICICI Bank’s iconic character – Chintamani, Vodafone’s ZooZoo, and some musical animation by Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.
Tokri is an understated animation work and comes from the creator of Chintamani. It picks up the story of an average school-going girl from the non-posh localities of Mumbai, her everyday life, her curiosities, and her family bonds. Tokri has set the bar high with impeccable sets, detailing, and storytelling.
Final thoughts
Arts are subjective, and while the world can eternally battle about which animated movie should have won the Oscars, we forget that bagging an Oscar doesn’t indicate the artistic or technical superiority are with the winning film only. Making all sorts of good movies and enjoying them thoroughly is the key.
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