The animated conversation this year has been dominated by the medium’s biggest grosser yet (“Inside Out 2”) and one of the most acclaimed big-studio entries in years (“The Wild Robot”). But don’t sleep on the many other noteworthy contenders that deserve consideration in the animation race this season, among them: the latest entry in the beloved Wallace and Gromit franchise; an adult-oriented, handmade clay-animated fantasy-drama from Australia; a Transformers origin movie that makes the bold move of imbuing its giant bots with personalities and relationships; and a strange, unique, hilarious and sneakily touching story of a human-size cat and an angsty teen.
“Ghost Cat Anzu”
The deceptively simple-looking “Ghost Cat Anzu” is actually idiosyncratically drawn from live-action frames in a rotoscoping process. The Japanese film boasts memorable, wacky characters who make real emotional connections; you have no idea where the story is going.
A teen, Karin, is left by her ne’er-do-well widowed father in the care of her grandfather at a temple. There, she meets a human-size cat, Anzu, who rides a moped and works part-time as a masseur. Karin is not your typical sweet anime girl, and the narrative is bizarre, unexpected and hilarious.
Nobuhiro Yamashita first directed the scenes in live-action, with the actors sometimes outfitted in the outlandish costumes of the remarkably designed, magical characters. Yōko Kuno then directed the animation process.
“In many cases when a rotoscope is used, reality is re-created,” Yamashita says. “But in this case, we added a bit more dimension, so it became different from reality. I think Ms. Kuno was able to capture the performance of the characters in the animation form.”
Kuno normally makes animated films without rotoscoping, “so it was a very wonderful experience for me. I realized that the performances of actors were really rich. Normally, I’m just creating characters inside my head, but in this case, I could rely on the actors.”
The process sounds normal, but when you see the characters they were portraying and the things they were doing, “Ghost Cat Anzu” becomes all the weirder and wilder — and better.
“Transformers One”
Who knew Optimus Prime was funny?
In the risk-taking origin story “Transformers One,” Oscar-winning director Josh Cooley (“Toy Story 4”) takes us to Cybertron, the home planet of the giant robots before the infamous civil war destroyed it — and before a lowly mining bot named Orion Pax became the legendary leader of the Transformers.
We should have had a clue Orion would be kind of wacky when we learned who was voicing him: Chris Hemsworth, he who found the humor (and hammer) in Thor.
“I talked to him a ton about how do we approach this character who we know will become Peter Cullen,” who iconically provided his booming, authoritative voice for years, “and the Optimus Prime we know,” Cooley says. “I wanted to see what he was like beforehand. And you don’t want to go the entire opposite end of the spectrum, which is like, he’s an a— and he’s a villain because you want the audience to be on this journey with him. So, it was fun to make him just a little more immature at first.”
The result is by far the funniest, most human of all the Transformers movies, with one of the franchise’s only real emotional arcs: Two bots start as close as brothers and end up as legendary enemies Optimus Prime and Megatron.
“Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl”
The dramatic music stings. The shadowy prison cell. The revenge-obsessed convict keeping body and mind honed for his chance. The silent, blank-eyed penguin known as Feathers McGraw.
No, it isn’t “Cape Fear.” It’s “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” the latest entry in Aardman’s stop-motion franchise.
“When it started off, initially, it wasn’t about Feathers McGraw and a revenge film,” says creator and co-director Nick Park, a four-time Oscar winner. “It was a simple idea of, ‘What if Wallace invents a smart gnome, a robot gnome, to help Gromit in the garden, and things inevitably go wrong?’ But it was missing something — a clear, motivated villain. And there, staring at us off the shelf, was Feathers McGraw, who people had often asked if he’s ever going to return.”
“Vengeance” is largely concerned with Norbot, the robot garden gnome whose efficiency makes Gromit (Good dog, Gromit!) feel like a fifth wheel around absent-minded inventor Wallace. With imprisoned Feathers possessing alarmingly honed hacking skills, however, sinister doings will soon be afoot.
“We’re not anti-technology at all. We’re very pro-technology,” says co-director Merlin Crossingham, in a declaration that’s a bit strange coming from the house of Aardman, the world’s most famous stop-motion animators. “It’s who’s controlling it; it really is a story about their relationship and their relationship with technology.”
He adds: “We think we’ve discovered a new genre of filmmaking: Gnome Gnoir.”
“Memoir of a Snail”
What if Todd Solondz made a clay-animation film about a girl who grows up in bizarre circumstances? It might show the world through a warped lens and put her through the wringer at every turn — but it probably wouldn’t have the humor and eventual hopefulness of Oscar winner Adam Elliot’s “Memoir of a Snail.”
Elliot‘s work has been received differently around the world. “But this film, I feel, is a little bit more universal,” he says. “It’s probably to do with the fact that it has a happy ending. Maybe it’s slightly more mainstream. I dunno. It is certainly an art-house film, that’s for sure. It’s not an ‘Inside Out 2’ or a ‘Wild Robot,’ ” he says, of charges leveled by no one.
There is humor in the film, but there’s also quite a bit of suffering life’s grotesqueries along the way as protagonist Grace sees everyone she cares about stripped away from her on her way to becoming a snail-obsessed hoarder.
“I’ve always said, if you’re not an emotional wreck by the end of one of my films, I failed,” says Elliot. “I’m quite cruel to my protagonists. I drag them through the mud, I torture them, they suffer a lot of trauma, but then I reward them at the end.”
He continues: “I do get emails from people who say, ‘Adam, your films are not for children.’ And I say, ‘Of course! Why are you taking your children to my films? They’re rated R!’”