Forum - View topicNEWS: Makoto Shinkai, Mamoru Hosoda, Sunao Katabuchi Invited to Join Oscars' Academy
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Cardcaptor Takato
 Posts: 4821 |
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If we ever want the Academy culture to change, we need more voices in the Academy who are serious and passionate about anime. Telling the voices that do care about anime that they shouldn't accept the invitation out of protest that won't have any effect seems counter productive to me.
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Xe4
 Posts: 96 |
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I won't be surprised at all if Mirai gets a nomination next year. GKids does a wonderful job lobbying animated films, and has gotten far more obscure stuff a nomination (see: Boy and the World, My Life as a Courgette, Chico and Rita).
There's a lot of problems with how the Academy handles animation. But the nomination process wasn't one of those issues. In fact they did such a good job nominating lesser known but amazing stuff the Academy had to open up the nominations to outside the animation branch lol And even with that the nominations were mostly* pretty good. *Excluding Boss Baby and Ferdinand which was pretty silly, considering there were movies that were far better, even looking only within Hollywood (Captain Underpants and Lego Batman notably) not to mention outside it. |
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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People advocating snubbing the Oscar invite sound like Groucho Marx: "I refuse to join any club as a member."
What good would that do? If our goal is to bring some more mainstream attention to anime movies (which will ultimately benefit us as fans, with. wider releases, and quicker, better disc releases & streaming availability), we should encourage everybody who cares about anime & gets invited to accept their invitation! I am very encouraged by the anime & world indie animators on this list. |
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Usagi-kun
 Posts: 877 Location: Nashville, TN |
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It has become a ritual, hasn't it? Commercials, advertisements for high end brands, and that sense of pampered exclusivity is annoying to sit through, With the magic of the internet, you can google winners and every piece of info on the nominees that you need on various websites like Wikipedia, YouTube, IMDb, take your pick. Another reason they are trying to diversify might be just to stay relevant and sustainable. The attention of cinema fans is easily pulled elsewhere and with ease of information, how long will they be able to keep this pageant going, and what point does the art get completely overshadowed by the presentation and politics? |
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Cardcaptor Takato
Posts: 4821 |
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Honestly even if an anime movie by some miracle won an Oscar, the fans would probably quickly turn on it and complain about how over-rated it was like they did when Spirited Away won and that whole weird rivalry between Your Name and A Silent Voice with the Crunchyroll awards last year. People complaining about the Oscars is as much a ritual as the Oscars themselves.
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I've known people who vote for these movies, and that is indeed the case. They won't watch something until they receive FYC materials for that movie. There are just so many movies that come out every year that they don't have time to watch them all, especially those they don't know about or weren't interested in prior to their nominations.
Oh, I've seen that article. It's really more of a bias against animated films in particular. There was another one out there (I think from Variety magazine) in which the voter put his phone on a table and spun it to decide which one to vote for, which landed on Wreck-It Ralph so he voted for it (which, if you ask me, got seriously snubbed in favor of Brave). We have to remember that the majority of these voters skew far older than the intended demographics for anime, or animation in general. Even when the movie is meant for all audiences, like your name and Pixar's works, said voters grew up during the Animation Age Ghetto, when it was shameful to for adults to say they liked something animated. (Case in point: The Brave Little Toaster was snubbed at Sundance because, while the judges deemed it the best of that year's screened films, they were fearful of losing credibility for themselves and of Sundance as a whole if an animated film managed to win.) Due to that Animation Age Ghetto upbringing, they just vote for whichever one their kids liked the most, and the odds would be against them saying stuff like your name. were it ever nominated. The Annie Awards are much friendlier to these movies. An anime movie rarely ever wins, but they still get nominated all the time for Best Animated Feature and are taken seriously by the Annies committee. (Animation fans largely lay attention to the Annies rather than the Oscars' Best Animated Picture category anyway.)
I think it's because there are some people in the anime fandom, and some who are regular posters on this site, who DON'T want anime to be more popular or recognized in the United States (as well as a more extreme subgroup who are astonished at people who want that). It comes across to me as similar to when some underground rock band is actually picked up by a record label. As of the past few years, I've also noticed something of a fandom rivalry between anime and Hollywood. You'll find very much disparaging of major Hollywood releases here, and if you go to IMDb, there's a good deal of anime-bashing there. On the other hand, your name. currently sits at #78 on the IMDb Top 250, right below The Empire Strikes Back and right above M. |
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4469 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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Therein lies the rub. It wasn't Boss Baby that kept Your Name from being nominated, it was the single theatre release in 2016 that rendered Your Name ineligible from being nominated in 2017 when it could have hypothetically been nominated over Boss Baby. Under Academy rules, since Your Name was a 2016 release in Japan, Funimation could have waited until 2017 to release it in North America, making it eligible as a 2017 film due to the one year extension granted to foreign films in the non-foreign categories, but the single theatre release in 2016 without much promotion thwarted whatever chances Your Name might have had at gaining at least an Oscar nomination. In This Corner of the World is an anime film people can rightfully claim was snubbed by the Academy in favour of Boss Baby, though, since that one was eligible as a 2017 film. |
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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Precisely. The Oscars are a Hollywood award for Hollywood movie of the year, they are like the equivalent Japanese awards such as the Japanese academy awards and hence they shouldn't pretend to be something truly global which strikes me as a rather ethnocentric attitude to invite people from all over the world into the academy. So I think that it is actually good that movies like Your Name were not nominated into the Oscars for animated feature. As the Oscars for animated feature are a prize given to animated movies that most closely adhere to Hollywood's perception of what animation should be: simplistic, politically correct and moralizing stories devoid of any sexuality, violence or serious tone and which are made for the entertainment of small children. Clearly, the people who run the Oscars are not the right audience for a movie like Your Name, which is a teenager romance movie full of elements that are alien to Oscar's sensibilities. One shouldn't try to force things into the wrong audiences: the vast majority of people (which include the vast majority of the Oscar people) are intellectually incurious people and the kind of people in the Oscars cannot appreciate stuff outside their "comfort zone", which in terms of animation is a very restricted zone indeed. |
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Jose Cruz
Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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I don't think so. It's just a natural reaction to the hypocritical attitude of Hollywood which is as ethnocentric as awards can get but then they pretend that they are global and diverse and that might "correct" any bias by just inviting a couple of Japanese people into the club. Obviously, people like Miyazaki declined these invitations as there is no point in joining a group of people whose cultural values and attitudes regarding their field of work are completely different from their own. I don't think it has anything to do with an attitute against the popularization of Japanese anime/manga culture in the west as nobody here is complaining about Amazon and Netflix who are actually distributing access to hundreds of anime titles to hundreds of millions of people in the western world.
I have not noticed anything like that. In fact there are glowing reviews of Miyazaki, Takahata, Shinkai and Hosoda's movies in the IMDB. While here people just don't talk a lot about Hollywood's movies. Its true that there are the random ignoramus in places like IMDB who sometimes say stuff like "this Japanimation crap" but this kind of people is not present in significant numbers. |
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ninjamitsuki
 Posts: 590 Location: Anywhere (Thanks, technology) |
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The Oscars are a joke, especially the voters lack of respect for animation (American or otherwise), but if they're willing to change that and show some respect for animation and not treat them so badly, good for them.
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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And yet there are many, many, many people in North America who are quite into the Oscars (not as many as there used to be, but still plenty) who would not have known about the films of these people otherwise. Plenty of them learn hear about foreign films for the first time that make it into the nominations or honorable mentions. I see no harm that can be done to the popularity of anime by having these people inducted in. It is, of course, their choice if they accept or decline them, and I am no mind reader or fortune teller so I wouldn't know who will accept or who will decline, but my point still stands that anime will not get less popular by their acceptance. (As an aside, I know you have a very dim view of North American animation. I try my best not to say anything about them as we don't really see eye to eye on that matter, but I had hoped you'd know that I enjoy plenty of North American animation and that you'd know how much I disagree on your assessment of North American animation as a whole. That is a topic for another day though.) |
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