Many things about the Oscars are ridiculous, but one of the most obvious is the award for Best Animated Feature. Introduced in 2001, the category’s there to save the Academy the shit they got when Disney’s Beauty and the Beast was nominated for Best Picture in 1992.
Earlier this week, another animated film, Pixar’s Toy Story 3, was nominated for Best Picture, as well as Best Animated Feature—yet again reinforcing the fact that, well, this whole “Best Animated” business is pretty useless. If a film’s good enough to be nominated for Best Picture, why would it matter if it’s animated?
The year’s two other contenders for Best Animated Feature are just as good as Toy Story 3: How to Train Your Dragon, an unexpectedly great flick from DreamWorks Animation (a studio better known for cranking out fluff like Kung Fu Panda and Shrek), and the expectedly great The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet’s follow-up to his beloved The Triplets of Belleville. Based on a script for an un-produced live-action film that was written by Jacques Tati in 1956, The Illusionist follows the titular magician—aging, weary, facing obsolescence—and his companion, a young, wide-eyed woman named Alice, who jumps at the chance to escape her provincial existence, only to find that life in the city isn’t all that she had hoped.
Nearly free of dialogue and full of stunningly evocative visuals, The Illusionist is whimsical and bittersweet, gorgeous and melancholy. I hesitate to say too much about it, because its many charms—countless small moments of sadness and humor—sneak up on you, patient and subtle. A master of movement and timing, Chomet lets The Illusionist unfold in confident, wide shots, letting his characters come to life through the most pedestrian of movements. But for all its nuance, The Illusionist is never anything but engrossing: This is a sad, sweet, humane story that Chomet carefully and precisely unravels, and it’s as much a work of art as anything that came out this past year, animated or not. 
Best Actor
Best Actress
Best Supporting Actor
Best Supporting Actress
Art Direction
Cinematography
Costume Design
Film Editing
Makeup
Visual Effects
This is a list of awards for which, because of the nature of the medium, animated films cannot be nominated. Shut the fuck up about the Academy inventing a new award to make sure hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work can potentially get some kind of recognition. You jackass.
1. Not sure why a quote from “Arrested Development” is apt enough to function as a caption by virtue of the words “magic show.”
2. I knew only that I waited for close to a year for this to be released and I was going to see it. My 9-year-old asked to see it with me, and he teared at the end, as did some adults. People should read from reviews how “triste” this film is before deciding to allow their kids to come. What reads as “fresh start” to adults can come across as “abandonment” to children.
3. It’s okay to mention that Jacques Tati himself makes a cameo appearance in the film, in a clip from “Mon Oncle.” And that Malcolm Ross formerly of Orange Juice and Aztec Camera composed some of the music.
4. Production issue: Content management systems don’t have brains. Two green boxes, one for each film titled “The Illusionist” accompany this article. Only the bottom of the two should.
I loved triplets of belleville, and I’m all about subtle, sad film. But this was like a SNL-star tries full length comedy and fails version of sadness. Instead of jokes, the film piles sadness punchline upon sadness punchline until it just seems like the filmmakers are going for sadness density points instead of telling a story.
Case in point: Dejected, unemployed, illusionist walks the street alone pondering his fate, encounters puppetless-sad-clown-faced-midget-ventriloquist who is now drowning his sorrow in booze and panhandling, takes pity on sad clown (again, w/out his best friend the puppet!), and gives him a penny – sad, touching… and then a WIENERDOG IN A WHEELCHAIR (with its back legs in one of those little two-wheel dog cart things) comes wheeling up OUT OF NOWHERE and licks the sad puppetless man’s hand. wtf?
Don’t even get me started on the ending.
All in all, pretty pictures, but I think the film gets lost in its own ambiance and forgets that the point of film is to move and entertain with a compelling story, not drown the viewer in vignettes and easy emotion.