Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Huh, I didn't think the category was that recent (since I heard it was created to avoid another Beauty and the Beast situation)…

Yeah, the early 2000's weren't exactly a golden age for Disney, so I can get that they didn't win as often.

Edited by Lyendith on Feb 25th 2019 at 5:37:13 PM

It's still amazing (pun intended) that ITSV won.

Like, how did ITSV become as great as it did? Was it through a series of happy coincidences or something?

Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Feb 25th 2019 at 11:37:09 AM

I felt Fantastic Mr. Fox should have won. I don't like Isle of Dogs much although I think its charming but Fantastic Mr. Fox is a genuinely good and interesting animated movie with hands down one of George Clooney's best characters and Wes Anderson is a great film-maker and artist and getting someone like him to do animation which he cares a lot about, and him making an animated movie that's actually an animated movie and not an arty attempt at Slumming It (see Anomalisa) was worth encouraging.

I suppose I was strident. I just didn't know another way to get the point across. The Incredibles is a good movie don't get me wrong, and it's good that people adapt comics properties in new directions even if I don't care for Big Hero 6.

Let's put it this way, From a Certain Point of View, Birdman was a superhero movie. It won Best Picture and its big joke was having Batman play a hack actor who is haunted by an appearance in a superhero movie. The Batman The Animated Series did that shtick in its landmark Beware the Gray Ghost with Adam West himself and it made more sense because Adam West really was defined by Batman, whereas Michael Keaton has always been a respected and in-demand character actor and he appeared semi-regularly in movies (like Tarantino's Jackie Brown) and he wasn't really defined by Batman in the same way. For a lot of people Beelejuice is his iconic rule. Birdman got accolades while only people of a certain age know the Gray Ghost thing.

It was also because there was a number of different animated features coming out and so on. Not all of them made by Disney. Producers and others behind those would want a category to recognize animators. And again, if Documentaries have a separate category, Animated Feature should too.

Beauty and the Beast was recognized as a fluke. Pocahontas which everyone behind the scenes was sure would win Best Picture landed with a thud. The Lion King got music Oscars. And the later Disney movies like Hunchback were too weird and older voters would prefer the live-action Hunchback made in the late 30s with Charles Laughton. Hercules and Tarzan underwhelmed.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Feb 25th 2019 at 8:46:23 AM

Genuine love for the source material, even if it's not 100% faithful.

Edited by RAlexa21th on Feb 25th 2019 at 8:41:18 AM

Well, there were a few steps in-between. In the mid-1990s what I call the "multi-age" started. Multi, because a market which was previously dominated by Disney was suddenly populated by Dreamworks and Pixar, too. More movies put more pressure to actually recognize some of them on the academy, so they started the new century with the new category. The first award was given out in 2001. Disney won the award the first time in 2007 with Ratatouille. It was the third win for Pixar, but Disney purchased Pixar only in 2006, so the first two are technically not Disney wins (though Disney distributed for Pixar).

In the first years there were also only three nominees. It's only since 2011 that there are yearly five.

I think the team working on the movie was not Sony's regular bunch. It's more a passion project which was realized under the Sony banner.

The fantastic Mr. Fox had no chance because Up wasn't just nominated for Animated but for Best picture too. And even without Up in the line-up, Caroline was a strong contender.

Edited by Swanpride on Feb 25th 2019 at 8:44:12 AM

One thing about the animation Oscar is that we tend to overlook Best Animated Short. A category that exists since 1931. Now animated shorts are these indie things and so on, but originally Animated Shorts were the bread and butter mainstream...and if you factor television it still is the main way animation is consumed. Walt Disney won Best Animated Shorts continuously from 1931-1939 and those include iconic cartoons that still play in syndication. Tom And Jerry also won many Oscars in the 40s and 50s. Looney Tunes were the real Award Snub, only 5 winners in the 40s and 50s and not one Chuck Jones or Tex Avery in sight. Jones later won for The Dot and the Line, a really pretentious and arty cartoon he knocked out in The '60s when animated shorts were migrating to television with low budgets and so on. Only one Bugs Bunny short ever won an Oscar Knighty Knight Bugs which is not one of his best.

The iconic Superman Theatrical Cartoons by the Fleischer Bros. Nada. The Fleischer Superman cartoons were the ITSV of their day. Really great cartoons, true to the character, and influential. In fact it was in these cartoons, that Superman first flew. Before he jumped around. But these cartoons had him fly and that stuck. And Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs got special Oscars anyway. So technically the first Animated Feature, Snow White, actually did get Oscars. And that might not be enough for some but consider that The Bicycle Thieves also got a special Oscar before the creation of the Best Foreign Film category. And a lot of people would argue that Foreign Films should be included more in Best Picture and as it is few are.

So the issue about Beauty and the Beast not winning Best Picture and so on, feels trite if you take a long view.

Sure, but Snow White and the Seven Dwarves should have won "best Production" (which I guess equals best movie). Do you know what won that year? Yeah, I didn't know either, so I looked it up: You Can't Take it with You. The movie isn't even Capra's best work, and it is certainly NOT as enduring or a project half as risky as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was. One movie is now quite dated. The other is on the list of the 100 best movies of all time, a true game changer which ushered in the century of traditionally animated movies. At least Beauty and the Beast lost against Silence of the Lambs.

Edited by Swanpride on Feb 25th 2019 at 11:06:25 AM

1938 was a pretty good year, looking at the nominees. The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn was nominated, you know swashbuckling action-adventure Technicolor movie, then Jezebel and of course The Grand Illusion, the great French classic that is the first non-English movie nominated for any award, and got nominated 2 decades before the creation of the Foreign Language category (1957). Snow White got honorary Oscars while these others didn't get anything.

And you know Disney won Oscar after Oscar continuously throughout the decade for Animated Short, whereas Tex Avery never won anything. Unless you think an animated short is less than a feature inherently so. Making that statement would be tantamount to saying Tom and Jerry, the entire Looney Tunes, and the classic Mickey, Donald, and Goofy shorts to say nothing of The Three Little Pigs (a classic short where the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Woolf?" became a popular meme and classic during the Depression, and inspired the title of the play, and later movie, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf).

So I don't see much to kvetch about Snow White not getting anything.

Bring that to the Oscar thread.

Have a source for that? I'd like to read some of those quotes.

"The Incredibles owes its victory to the fact that its competitors were Shark Tale and Shrek 2. " I found Shrek 2 to be better than Shrek in many ways. A lot of people cite it as an example of a Even Better Sequel.

INTS won through several factors. It was released around the holiday season which helped its chances, and it turned out to be good enough for word of mouth to spread like wildfire about it.

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/awards/academy-voters-dont-watch-the-animated-features-they-vote-on-and-the-academy-is-fine-with-that-170670.html

Edited by kyun on Feb 25th 2019 at 12:54:39 PM

Well, Hollywood doesn't take videogames or anime seriously either, so it shouldn't be a surprise.

If you mean movies based on video-games, then yeah Hollywood doesn't take it seriously, because Video Game Movies Suck. I mean I hope you don't think the Oscars should be awarded to games because that is an entirely new medium, it's like asking the Oscars to give awards to Architecture. They give music awards only when it's connected to the movies like for musical score or original song. As it is, Stan Lee got to feature in an In Memoriam video alongside other departed icons, which is nice. And again the Oscars have provided more honor to animation than any other major awards institution. Why don't you see the Cannes, Venice, and other major film festivals and find out how animation does there? Because the fact is even serious film critics, the kind who complain about Award Snub and Oscar Bait, even they don't respect or care about animation. The Oscars provided a category for Best Animated Short in 1931, just five years in. Far before they created categories for Foreign Film and Documentary.

Look, ITSV won, the Academy voters were enthused about it genuinely. They gave the award to the movie because they liked it. Isn't that good enough? Yeah it sucks that they didn't watch the other movies and so on, so its Right for the Wrong Reasons but ITSV won because people loved the movie, on word-of-mouth and so on. In other words it wasn't cynicism or lobbying or anything.

Did anyone note that Sony apparently made the software they used for ITSV open source?

I’m kinda wondering what’s going to use this style next.

I mean in an ideal world, Academy awards wouldn't mean anything. Spider-Verse never needed a trophy from a bunch of white guys to prove itself a good movie.

I don't pay attention to Oscars much, both due to the way it treats the animation slot and because of how dominated by Hollywood politics and old fashioned thinking the rest of the proceedings tend to be.

This year was a surprise in many respects, but judging by that article and Green Book's win, there's still a long way to go.

There will be an “Alt-Universe Cut”[1]of the movie with tons of unused material that didn’t make the final cut including a more accurate take on Miles and Ganke’s relationship which was removed because of Ned in Homecoming.

I'd like to see it. Good that they're promoting it as "Alt-Universe Re-Cut". Not Director's Cut which is often a misnomer and misunderstanding as to how things like this happen. Which you see all the time with this Snyder cut nonsense.

I hope the material is all finished and polished.

Yeah, because director's cut generally implies dissatisfaction with the theatrical product, usually because of Studio Mandates (like the narration in the original cut of Blade Runner or the heavy cuts made to Kingdom of Heaven).

Yes, but that can sometimes be something as straightforward as run times where material has to be left out for time constraints.

... well superheroes and game adaptations are only going to be more prevalent in movies. So the Academy has to suck it up and deal with it.

Technically ITSV is their way of honoring games. Some of the seeds for this film can be traced to Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions which basically had you switch different AU versions of Spider-Man: Regular, Ultimate, Noir, 2099. The writer of that game Dan Slott, had an idea to have these AU interact and banter with each other and feature more alternates but they couldn't work it for time/budget reasons and not being able to fit gameplay. So Slott took the idea to comics and tried for years to make it work. ITSV is actually more similar to Shattered Dimensions than the Spider-Verse comic, since that's about stopping dimensions from collapsing and reality collapsing. Which was also a point in Edge of Time, a kind of sequel to that.

So the Academy did honor games without them knowing they did so. In any case, if there isn't a video game movie that's good that video game fans themselves acknowledge and accept, as evident from Video Game Movies Suck, the AMPAS is under no obligation to recognize them.

Knowing how Noir's Uncle Ben died...haha.

Glad Shattered Dimensions teached it.

Rewatching on Youtube digital streaming is a blessing, since I can run it at 25% speed to catch all the easter eggs. One of the most ridiculous so far - during the scene where Kingpin sees a bunch of alternate Vanessas and Richards, there's a surprising number of character models that are radically different from the ones we see in his flashbacks: there's two different versions of them that are black (possibly referencing Michael Clarke Duncan's portrayal?), one where they're both platinum blonde, and one where they appear to be replaced with Matt Murdock and his mother Maggie. Most of these appear for a fraction of a second.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Feb 27th 2019 at 12:34:55 PM

It's the equivalent of Developer's Foresight and Freeze-Frame Bonus at its finest.

Certainly beats the vague fluttering Rorschach test of seeing Wasp's wings shadow in the Quantum Realm in Ant-Man.