GameRx Prognosis: How Brave Wrecked Ralph

In light of the Oscars, I’ve heard many decry the awarding of “Best Animated Feature” to Pixar’s Brave. I’m left speechless in their wake. It’s not that these other movies lack value – after all, they were all well-received enough to be nominated for Oscars. The problem here is a fundamental misunderstanding as to what the Oscars are. I mean, there’s a reason why people call this the annual Pixar Award. Who did you all expect to win? Frankenweenie?

Before we get too far into why certain films succeed and certain films fail, let’s remember why the Oscars exist to begin with. The Academy Awards Ceremony was started in 1928 when MGM established the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) as a formal organization for the advancement of film as a medium. Thus, the Academy Awards (aka “Oscars”) are awarded annually to films that promote the advancement the medium in varying categories, including direction, production, music, special effects, and so on. Membership in the Academy is honorary and bestowed via invitation from certain powers within the organization. As membership currently stands, there are about 6,000 people who vote on what films earn what Oscars. Roughly 22% of these people are actors, the largest of the voting blocs in the club. Makes enough sense. Everyone else in there is involved for some other reason, whether for direction, writing, philanthropy, or pretty much whatever the hell the powers in the Academy want to do. Makes enough sense.

For our more short and cynical readers, that pretty much means the Oscars are gold trophies chosen by old rich movie stars to give to younger rich movie stars. These awards aren’t really meant for us to enjoy; they’re pretty much the meat and potatoes of Academy politics and blockbuster industry careers. Now that we know this, let’s revisit Brave and consider its reception among the cynically reductionist members of the Academy; a thousand aging men who used to do film, all their friends, some of their friends, and about a thousand actors.

Before moving on to the nominees, let’s think about why the Best Animated Feature award exists. According to Wikipedia, some basic criteria have to be met.

An animated feature is defined by the academy as a film with a running time of more than 40 minutes in which characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique, a significant number of the major characters are animated, and animation figures in no less than 75 percent of the running time.

That seems straightforward enough. However, the Academy chooses not necessarily the best, most popular, or most technically impressive film. It’s whichever film they feel deserves the reward, which requires a much different state of mind than choosing by any sort of canon. It’s all a very political affair, in addition to looking at why they chose Brave, we should look at why they didn’t choose the other four movies.

While I enjoyed the film, I will not hesitate to admit that Brave has its fair share of shortcomings. The will o’ the wisp was a promising but poorly handled plot device. The gags with the witch’s answering machine kettle, while cute, weren’t consistent with the comedy of the rest of the film. The choices in women’s fashion were ages ahead of their time, and the unnecessary drama over the corset was woefully anachronistic in so many ways that people write entire reviews just about that corset. It’s not flawless. It’s not a new story. However, it is a well-polished piece; solid art direction, great music, and a mixture of drama and comedy that has a pretty wide appeal. However, I think the major points of importance are getting lost behind quibbles of plot holes and  the general arc of the story.The reason Brave gets so much recognition for its rather unoriginal plot is because it is contextually groundbreaking.

As your childhood is probably well aware, Disney pretty much single-handedly invented “fairy tale princess” as genre and film archetype, one that acts as a pretty good litmus test for female protagonists in contemporary western literature. We see the evolution of women’s narrative function from the simple beginnings of a pretty, white damsel in distress in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) all the way to the self-reliant black culinary entrepreneur with interracial love interest we see in The Princess and the Frog (2009). That’s quite a leap for 70 years of cultural change, especially when you consider all the in-between works that experiment with relationships successfully crossing other differences, including race, wealth, social status, artistic talent, ideology, or disability. Disney always manages to push the envelope just a little bit farther each time, going to considerable lengths to empower women in their stories.

However, much to the chagrin of some moviegoers and film critics, the female protagonist has always relied on the financial and emotional support of a male in a heterosexual relationship. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is definitely the standard to which all of these folk tale inspired stories are crafted. There is scarcely a soul alive who actually remembers a time before the Disney Princess. While the foundations of egalitarianism are old news to younger generations, a lot of these changes in the way we tell stories are actually really big leaps to more people than you’d think. In Brave, we see Merida taking control of her life out of the hands of the leaders of patriarchal Scottish society. That’s a pretty big step forward considering the rest of the Disney Princess genre.

There’s also the added politics that Pixar had to win in a sense. This was the first movie that Pixar had made that wasn’t in it’s original list of movie ideas. Everything from Toy Story to Up was written down in broad strokes in one day where the founders of Pixar first laid the foundations of the company. Brave was something new and different, probing outward into new territory for the first time. If Brave failed to deliver an Oscar, it would be pretty bad news for the studio. It’s not like they’d have to fold, but it would be the first real damper on their otherwise glowing filmography.

But enough about why Brave won. That’s only one half of the puzzle? What about the other movies? Why did they fail?

Well, I’m glad you asked!

The Pirates! Band of Misfits (or The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! just about everywhere else in the world) never really had a chance in the context of this year’s lineup, even as one of the generally well-received Aardman comedies. Films and shorts from Aardman Animations had a pretty good track record with the Academy back in the nineties, earning awards and nominations for their now classic claymation shorts, including Creature Comforts (1989) and The Wrong Trousers (1993) among others. Unfortunately, they just haven’t had the same luck when it comes to their recent forays into the more competitive realm of feature films. Of their four other feature films (excluding this year’s nominee), the only one to be nominated for an Oscar was Wallace & Grommit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), winning in a baffling victory over Corpse Bride (2005) and Howl’s Moving Castle (2005). The fact that Aardman Animations won that particular Oscar was probably less from narrative content or technique and more from the Academy’s enduring fondness for the titular characters. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I doubt anyone was surprised when The Pirates! returned to port empty-handed.

ParaNorman is a really impressive claymation film from Laika Inc, the same studio that made Coraline (2009) and the stop-motion musical group The California Raisins. The movie dabbles around in a children’s horror story, following the life of a boy named Norman who can see and talk to the souls of the dead. His gift makes him the only one who can save his town from a pack of zombies from a local colonial cemetery. The film was the first to use 3D color printers to sculpt the faces of the characters, giving the characters a surreal smoothness and crisp detail that really made the film stand out from similar pieces. The film also kept a good balance between drama and comedy, contributing to what became a skilled subversion of classic Romero zombie films. Unfortunately for Laika, the Academy doesn’t really do zombies or undead things that aren’t vampires. They bring up uncomfortable questions about life, death, morality, and ethics; that’s some pretty deep stuff for what is ostensibly a children’s movie, which will put some people outside of their comfort bubble. As much as I loved this movie, it didn’t stand a chance if there was going to be any other big player on the table, especially a Pixar flick.

Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie has some of the same problems as ParaNorman in terms of undead narrative devices, but it has a few more things working against it. The movie is actually a remake of an older Disney live-action flick, also called Frankenweenie (1984) and also directed by Tim Burton. Even though the original wasn’t particularly successful (running into controversy causing its release to be shelved until 1992), the Academy probably saw this as double-dipping; giving Burton the award would legitimize remaking your own movies, which is a standard very few people want to see come to fruition. That aside, Frankenweenie could easily be disregarded for any number of reasons. Burton didn’t really try anything new here in terms of style, instead choosing to rehash his now cliche claymation style, featuring sad children with big emotional eyeballs. It used to be quirky and different, but the more of them I see, the more it feels like a overwrought gimmicky tribute to repackage German expressionist film to sell trendy clothes to young teens. Heck, I know I immediately judged the movie pretty harshly when I first heard the name of Frankenweenie. It just felt like the filmmakers were trying to market to a younger audience with…well, a lower maturity standard, so I just wasn’t interested. It’s the same reason I never grabbed a copy of Captain Underpants at the Scholastic Book Sale when I was in elementary school. If the title and premise don’t grab you, you don’t have to watch it. Capital idea!

Ooh boy, here’s where the feelings get hurt. I don’t know how to put this lightly: Wreck-It Ralph was at no point destined for an Oscar. I don’t care how much you hated Brave. I don’t care how much you love video games. This  movie was nominated because it was made by Disney, and that’s the cold, hard truth. Don’t take this the wrong way, though; Wreck-It Ralph is a great video game movie. If anything, this is exactly the sort of movie we needed to negate the box office flop that was Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) to show that game culture is profitable. Just about the only people in the world that could pull enough weight and pour enough capital into that hole for a good bounce back are associates or subordinates of Disney. To put it bluntly, the problem is that no one at the Academy gives a crap about video games – and honestly, we pretty much have to accept that. People like different things, and it’s not exactly breaking news that old people like old things and young people like new things. Video games have been a constant in our lives and are thus a keystone to our  development as a generation. We can’t force Roger Ebert to like games just as much as he can’t force us to like foreign art films.

Sound familiar?

Being disappointed that your favorite movie didn’t win the award is acceptable. Justifying your disappointment with anger against the winner is not.

Doc Watson is one of three editors for The RedShirt Crew Blog. His favorite Disney Princess will always be Emperor Kuzco. Feel free to validate his internet existence by posting a comment or sending a tweet to @DocWatsonMD.