Rating: 3 1/2 stars (out of 4)

Though it’s easily the weakest season (or “book”) of the show’s three, the excellent first season of the Avatar: The Last Airbender is firmly in the category of superior children-oriented entertainment that’s deep and exciting enough to be appealing to all viewers.

The show’s opening sequence explains that the world of Avatar — an alternate version of Earth — was for centuries in balance between four nations. Each nation is named after one of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. A small percentage of people born to each nation are blessed with the ability to “bend”– spiritually manipulate through a hybrid of martial arts and magic — their element.

A hero known as the Avatar is the one person in the world who has the potential to bend all elements, and also enter something called the “Avatar state” which is a heightened power combining all four elements. It’s the Avatar’s role in the world to maintain balance and peace of the four nations. When one Avatar dies, he or she is reincarnated.

Avatar: The Last Airbender begins its story a hundred years after the Avatar has vanished. The Fire Nation has taken over, hunting the Air Nomads to extinction and the Water Tribe to near-extinction. A brother and sister of the Water Tribe, Sokka and Katara, discover a member of the Air Nomads frozen in an iceberg.

We quickly learn that this Airbender, Aang (rhymes with “bang”), is in fact the Avatar, and the time has come for him to fulfill his duties and restore peace and balance to the planet.

Meanwhile, a banished prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko, has been tasked with capturing the Avatar to restore his honor. When Aang reappears, Zuko quickly begins tailing him.

I’ll end my explanation of the premise there, because Avatar is rare in how quickly its plot progresses and expands. Suffice to say that The Last Airbender is a globe-spanning epic, and it shows in these twenty episodes.

Like any great television story, regardless of genre or intended demographic, Avatar thrives because its characters are both well-defined and dynamic. The characters start out as basic types: We’re first shown Aang as the naive one, Katara as the optimistic one, Sokka as the comic relief, Zuko as the obsessed villain, and Iroh as the goofy wise-man. But these types serve as springboards for more complex creations. Every major character is given depth and ambiguity that is gradually revealed.

Few kids’ shows dare to have a serial story. But Avatar is one long arc with several multi-episode stories and a very strong continuity that makes it tough to watch episodes out of order. This provides for a more satisfying storytelling than the usual one-and-done format for animated stories.

I wish the creators had taken it even further, though. “Water,” the official name of the first season, has a large set of one-offs during the beginning and middle of season that don’t move the story forward. But even these one-offs enrich Avatar‘s world. Episodes like “Jet” and “The Kyoshi Warriors” really depict destruction and suffering caused by the invasion. (Plus, almost every episode gets some sort of reprise in the later seasons, making every episode essential.)

Focusing a bit more on the serial plot and less on one-offs would have given the writers a chance to solve one of the problem the season faces in its final episodes: some serious pacing hiccups. The changes the characters go through in the Northern Water Tribe are seriously rushed. Sokka’s relationship with Yue and Katara’s training in waterbending take place entirely over just a couple of episodes when they’re really major developments worthy of longer arcs.

The finale also suffers from a few plot twists that abandon the emotionally grounded reality of the show for a conclusion that’s awe-inspiring but not moving in the same way the next two season finales are.

Each one of the main characters has their moments to shine. Aang’s gradual maturity is convincing, but especially believable following his heartbreak at discovering the fate of his people in “The Southern Air Temple” and guilt after inadvertently hurting Katara in “The Deserter.”  It’s hard to imagine that the snot-covered Sokka of the pilot could ever be a convincing character of pathos, but his fury at Aang in “Bato of the Water Tribe” is earned, as is Katara’s seduction then reversal in “Jet” and response to finding “The Waterbending Scroll.”

But the show-stealer, beginning with “The Storm” about halfway through the season, is Zuko. Though he’s obsessed — and whiny at first — the show slowly chips away at his shell to reveal a startling portrait of shame and pain. His journey is at the heart of the show, perhaps even moreso than the title character’s. The show brilliantly parallels Aang and Zuko in numerous episodes, and most of these are among the season’s best — particularly “The Storm,” perhaps the entire season’s highlight.

Zuko has too many great moments to mention them all, but his big revelation in “The Blue Spirit” and moments of vulnerability and doubt towards the season’s conclusion are particularly unforgettable.

Along with characters that work on an emotional level and a plot that works on a intellectual level, The Last Airbender‘s first season also works in a visual and visceral level. The design of the show is stunning, heavily influenced by anime and other Eastern art. You can see some of this in the plotting and the comic timing, but it’s especially apparent with the looks of the characters and settings.

It’s not a cheap knockoff, though. Rather than making a watered-down Naruto and Dragon Ball Z, the makers of Avatar instead use it as inspiration. They borrow a Japanese visual style, fuse it with some other Asian influences (detectably, some Indian and Chinese motifs), and presents in a distinctly American manner. Rather than diluted, the show’s diversity takes the strengths of many of its inspirations, and presents it with a level of care and detail unheard of in a weekday afternoon programming.

The best comparison I can come up with is Batman: The Animated Series. This gem from the mid ’90s had a wide variety of stylistic influences, but had a style all its own. Both shows have a maturity and darkness to them, though both still clearly fall under the umbrella of kid-oriented television.

Both shows are fun to look at, but have something beneath the surface. Batman paired, visually and thematically, noir-fused shots and a palpable menace. Avatar instead pairs a natural, earthy look with a moral urgency in a decaying world.

The most striking visual element of Avatar are its stunning “bending” action sequences, which are a breath of fresh air from typical fisticuffs and gadgetry of American adventure shows. The creator’s wring every conceivable situation from these supernatural abilities. Instead of having the characters stationary, calling forth magic or spells, the action is more kinetic and physical. These sequences alone make the show worth watching.

Another strength, equally important to Avatar’s success as the characterization and action, is the show’s allegiance to traditional storytelling. Every episode – or at least, every excellent episode – has stakes and consequences on its own. Yet, everything feels like it’s a part of a greater whole. Watching these episodes in sequence, they successfully feel like a first act to a large narrative.

Perhaps the biggest annoyance of the season and series as a whole is simply its nature as a kid-oriented show. Because it’s aimed at less experienced viewers, the lessons and themes of the show are rarely left implied. Pretty much everything is spelled out, which can come across as a bit cheesy, even contrived, at times. It doesn’t significantly diminish the quality of the show, but it could be off-putting at first to people weaned on mature, prime-time TV.

There’s also a childishness to the show’s silly humor that I find endearing but might grate others. The show improved on this in the other seasons as they realized they had a wider audience than they initially anticipated. Again, it’s a quirk of the show that the childish-at-heart will probably enjoy.

Overall, the first season of Avatar ranks among the best American-made animation of the past decade, even if it fails to reach the phenomenal heights of the next two seasons. It overcomes a few pacing issues towards the end of the season and a few throwaway episodes to be must-watch for anyone with a taste for animation, fantasy adventures, and kung-fu. Even those who don’t fall in that category will find plenty to love in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Book 1: Water.

At some point on this past August 11^th, at Jiffy Lube Pavilion in Virginia, it all went away.  At some indefinable moment, while realizing that time had seemed to stop as Green Day obliterated tedium on their way through a legendary, two-hour-and-45-minute show, while observing that Billie Joe Armstrong is a frontman in ways that few are today, while deducing that this band had become much more expansive and adventurous than their critics would admit, all of the Green Day hate that I used to store up in my head had drifted away.  It had been eradicated by the firework-propelled opening of the title track to their last album, by the seamless transition from songs written 16 years ago to ones written less than 16 months ago, and by the connection and genuine love felt from the audience to its entertainers.  There was nothing left but admiration.

In my formative music years, I had to deal with an internal Green Day disapproval meter that pointed to red less because of actual knowledge than from some nebulous perception that they were too popular.  I wasn’t enamored with many of their songs that enjoyed radio love, and so, outside of “Basket Case,” I gave their music little attention.  When the trio teamed up with U2 to re-make “The Saints are Coming” for the New Orleans Saints in preparation for the 2006 NFL season, I loathed the pairing.

Shortly after that, I felt inexorably drawn towards something I had tried to resist.  “Saints” turned out better than I expected, but, mostly, Fugazi happened.  I wore out their discography in that fall of ’06 (my freshman year of college), and Dookie was next in my iTunes library.  Every time I got to the end of The Argument, I would prepare myself to stop the music…until I heard “I declare I don’t care no more / I’m burning up and out and growing bored,” heard the band start running, and suddenly the pause button was the furthest thing from my mind.  The revolution was underway, propelled by the inescapable fact that over a half-dozen songs off that album had implanted themselves in my mind without conscious intention—indeed, probably despite some conscious intention.

And so, for much of college, my interest in Green Day slowly expanded, albeit reined in by the cognitive dissonance engendered by that fall and the knowledge of my earlier distaste.  As such, it took until the last 12 months to see them as more than a one-album band.

When 21^st Century Breakdown was released last May, I was compelled to listen only because a friend played it for me.  My initial thought concerned my inability to get “Know Your Enemy” out of my head after just two listens, and then I observed other details about the album that didn’t jibe with Green Day stereotypes—that songs were often broken down into sections with disparate sounds, that the band was incorporating elements from all sorts of musical genres—and some that should always have been apparent—namely, that Billie Joe has one of the most underappreciated gifts for melody of our time.

Rolling Stone put it well in their review of Breakdown: “What’s more bizarre: the fact that they sound so ambitious and audacious on their eighth album, or the fact that they even made an eighth album?”  And therein lies Green Day’s walking contradiction; punk bands simply don’t last as long as they have.  They don’t evolve the way they have.  Dookie dropped just weeks before Kurt Cobain killed himself; what other bands of their genre are still relevant?

And a large part of Green Day’s evolution has been their thematic interest.  American Idiot shocked everyone; the joke went something like, ‘Wow, things are so bad, even Green Day are writing protest songs.’  Yet, paradoxically, that album was the most ‘punk’ of their career.  And the rants against the Bush administration and 2004’s political climate enlivened critics and fans alike, cultivating a career renaissance that happened even without a sharp decline.  Without a massive change in sound or a fall from grace, their seventh album redefined their career, a more impressive feat than you’d imagine.

In fact, Idiot became so recognizable that I longed for more people to go back and listen to their earlier work, to understand that 2004 wasn’t the first good year of their lives.  And before this month’s concert, I hadn’t even bought the album, my youthful resistance still holding a bit of ground.  But the show did many remarkable things, not least of which was converting me to Idiot.  In the last couple weeks, I’ve determined it’s indispensable to own alongside Breakdown, both because the latter naturally follows the former and also simply because the former is stellar.

Both these albums’ strengths were amplified live; Green Day and Billie Joe, now at least, convince you that they take themselves and their music seriously.  In an age of insouciance and apathy, bands that do so stand out; this is a substantial reason why the Arcade Fire are the new media darling.  Green Day’s contradiction can be summed up as such: they a shit—about the world around them, with or without Bush in office—and don’t give a shit—about people’s expectations for them, about their genre’s constraints, about their history.  I mean…9-minute, 5-part suites?  Over a minute of quiet piano slowly introducing songs? 

The show also furthered a key point of Breakdown—how far the band has progressed from their punk roots (in all ways except their politics).  The genre’s ideology emphasizes minimalism; it would never approve of the elaborate, sweeping show GD put on, not the lengthy interludes during songs or the flames bursting forth during the loudest moments of the most impassioned numbers.  Billie Joe channeled the spirit of all great frontmen by running around like a controlled drunk, always emphasizing inclusivity.  Someone threw me a lei?  Sure, I’ll put it on.  Want one fan on stage?  Why not 30?  It all worked, splendidly, and it proved to be done by a band living on its own terms.

Over the course of the nearly 3 hours, GD pulled, by my count, four tracks from Breakdown (the singles: title track, “Enemy,” “East Jesus Nowhere,” “21 Guns”), several from Idiot, occasional quirky deep cuts like “King for a Day,” and, of course, juicy Dookie standouts.  I would have loved me some “Nice Guys Finish Last” or “The Static Age,” but the band threw out more than a few bones, namely “She” and Warning’s “Minority.”  Would I have preferred one or two additional songs to be played in lieu of some of the mid-song interludes?  Perhaps, but it’s hard to complain about anything in the presence of such energy, such ferocity, such charisma.  GD have entrenched themselves as a peak live band of our time, possessing the ability to transport audience members into another world, the way great films and books do.

Really, though, a look back on the band’s discography reveals a few patterns that might have clued us in to their potential longevity.  The music and lyrics are consistently smarter than one would imagine, every song managing to sustain independence from its brothers while yet maintaining propulsive drive. (Dookie, for example, is one of the great energizing albums out there, but it has a heart and soul.) Throughout their career, they’ve written indelible breakneck rockers (“Burnout,” “Nice Guys,” “Idiot,” “Enemy”), effortlessly smooth power ballads (“Having a Blast,” “Redundant,” Worry Rock”), and then occasionally pulled back for change-of-pace slow-burners (“Good Riddance,” obviously, plus “Are We the Waiting”: “Last Night on Earth” still blows, however).  Their albums are typically too long, over-loaded with trimmable filler, but that’s sort of the point: with nothing to lose and nothing to prove, they always seem to be tossing off ideas just to see what sticks.

Billie Joe’s lyrics, from 1994 until now, are stronger than casual critics will give him credit for (Dookie wrings humor and mischievousness out of nothing, and the last two have many quotable lines), and his gift for hooks is borderline criminal (“Basket Case,” obviously, but also “Coming Clean,” “Scattered,” “Jesus of Suburbia,” “The Static Age”).  But it was only Breakdown that allowed me to see all of this, that allowed me to go back and listen to everything that came before, to realize that there was much more there than meets the eye.  That album’s staying power, frankly, stunned me; but it shouldn’t have, not with its diversity, smooth flow, and abundant creativity, hooks, color, and intelligence.

They’ve just never hit these peaks before—the epic bridges of “Static Age,” the second “Gloria,” “21 Guns”; the release when Billie Joe cries, “My generation is zero / I never made it as a working-class hero!”; the titanic drum lead-in back to the final chorus of “Enemy”; the passionate, inimitable Green Day gallop of the first “Gloria,” “Christian’s Inferno,” and “American Eulogy.”

On Nimrod’s “Worry Rock,” they declared, “Promise me no dead-end streets / And I’ll guarantee we’ll have the road.”  Well, Billie Joe, you should never fret about not having that road.

Earlier this year, Leonardo DiCaprio teamed up with Martin Scorsese for the astonishing Shutter Island, a profoundly disturbing foray into the mind of someone who didn’t always know what was real.  Now, a few months later, he’s paired himself with Christopher Nolan for Inception, a profoundly dizzying foray into dreams and reality.  From the guilt-ridden memories of a dead wife down to the nature of illusion and perception, Inception shares more than a few similarities with Shutter, and, while Inception is a very different type of film, the quality and impact are very nearly the same—which is extraordinary praise.  All told, DiCaprio has put together one of the best years for an actor in the past decade.

Inception’s plot, enveloped in secrecy as hype mounted before its July 2010 release, seemed labyrinthine when the teasers and trailers were leaked, and watching it once hardly clears everything up.  To sum up as much is necessary: Cobb (Leo) practices a form of theft called extraction, whereby he breaks into a person’s mind, invading their dreams to exploit their subconscious at a time when its defenses are lowered.  He’s recruited by a wealthy businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) for a more dangerous, more captivating, idea: “if you can steal an idea from someone’s mind, why can’t you plan one there?”

Thus, the “Inception” of the title represents planting an idea in someone’s mind, while he dreams, that is subsequently believed to be self-conceived.  A fascinating concept, to be sure, and it’s one that, the film implies, Cobb has been toying with for years.  He’s most attracted to Saito’s offer, however, because he’s promised the ability to return to America, something that hasn’t been possible since the death of Cobb’s wife Mal (Marion Cotillard).  So he enlists long-time associate Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an architect named Ariadne (Ellen Page), and other merry men, much like Danny Ocean assembled his team of thieves.

Soon, Cobb and his team are hurtling themselves into dreams within dreams within dreams; before seeing this movie, I already thought that ‘false awakenings’ were perhaps the creepiest thing I could contemplate, and here, the subject would have to ‘wake up’ 3 times to actually return to reality.  And in the process, Nolan creates some of the most astounding, awe-inspiring visual sights I’ve ever seen: a Parisian city folding over on top of itself like an Origami creation; water bursting through the sides of a building in a dream as a person is dropped into a bathtub; a freight train barreling down a highway, tossing aside cars as though they’re flies; structures that disintegrate, piece by piece, into the ocean; and, above all, that zero-gravity fight scene that has left me and everyone else jaw-dropped.  It simply has to be seen to be believed, probably should have been longer, and—along with everything else—should ensure that Nolan has all of the technical and visual Oscars locked up for 2010.

The idea that Cobb’s team are instructed to plant concerns the heir of a wealthy corporation (Cillian Murphy) dissolving his father’s empire, but Inception truly advances the motif of family devastation and reconciliation through Cobb, in his motivations for accepting the job and his own subconscious guilt that has been dogging his work.  Nolan, who spent 10 years working on the script, drives the plot forward with a remarkable amount of efficiency and stability—upon subsequent viewings, the film feels more coherent, not less, and everything just seems to fall into place precisely where it should.  The notion of dreaming, of invading someone else’s mind, of challenging the idea that everything that occurs inside our head is ours and ours alone, faces stricter and stricter tests as the film progresses.  And, simultaneously, Nolan ratchets up the action as the climax approaches, helping obliterate the potential torpor that could be engendered by a two-and-a-half hour running time.

I won’t get too bogged down in discussing theories and deciphering plot details; that’s not the subject of a movie review.  But I’ll say a few things to indicate how much I’m fascinated by this discussion.  It’s critical to note that it seems that Nolan, in the world he created, did not actually give us/his characters a way to differentiate dreams from reality—only to differentiate being in someone else’s dream or not.  Unless that top was a special type of totem (which I haven’t ruled out), it can’t differentiate reality from a person’s own dreams.  Because of that, and because the top may not have been Cobb’s actual totem (since it was his wife’s), the final shot—fascinating as it is, theoretically—is more a red herring than anything else.

I’ll say that I’m immensely intrigued by the scene where Cobb tests out his chemist’s (Dileep Rao) sedative, wakes up and tries to spin the top, and doesn’t actually do so—was he still in a dream from that point onward?  And I’m essentially convinced that the last scene does not represent ‘reality’…a position that, of course, hardly limits the number of possibilities of what did happen.

At first, I thought that Inception, though great, had a bit of an inherent ceiling built into it, since it was more of an action-packed thriller than an intense psychological study (compare with the superior Shutter).  And several reviewers noted that it resonated more strongly on an intellectual and visceral than an emotional level, and that may be true.  But, upon further reflection, I realized that I was fascinated by the notions that Nolan floats: that, once it takes hold, an idea can rarely be eradicated or changed within someone’s mind; that we have no way of knowing whether our world is real or not (Descartes’s “Dream Argument” that also informed Shutter) and, critically, that it doesn’t matter whether that top was about to fall over or not.

That is where Inception truly hits me like a ton of bricks; the more I’ve debated it with people afterwards, the more I’ve come to accept a very similar theme to Shutter.  We wonder what was real, and what was just in Leo’s head—and we debate theories proposing that everything we saw was a dream, or that someone was performing inception on him—and we decide that the distinction doesn’t matter.  Scorsese’s film emphasized the blur between sanity and insanity; here, the blur between dreams and reality is used to tell us that what’s ‘all in our heads’ can be real.  In Cobb’s mind, he had resolved his guilt, had moved his way past the stress that was infesting his life, had forgiven himself to the point where he could see his children.  His turning away from the totem at the end indicates that he doesn’t particularly care, that he shares a philosophy put forth about halfway through the film, a line that when I first heard I immediately stored in my brain as a potential movie theme: “Their dreams have become reality; who are you to say otherwise?”

So, yes, there are a couple tiny flaws within Inception; I still wonder if it could have been more philosophical, but, as I have to tell myself, not every great movie has to be brooding and contemplative.  Inception has it—that indefinable trait that enables it to still floor you, still leave you drained and tired, still make you want to remain planted in your seat during the credits, after 4 viewings in 3 weeks.  It’s the trait that makes it stick in your mind long afterwards, that keeps you awake at night as you toss and turn its ideas around in your head like a spinning washing machine.  It’s not just a complex plot that invites discussion about ‘what happened’; it’s more than that.  It’s not just filled with delectable visual treats.  It’s all of those things—and my, is it those things—but it’s a classic, a 4-star movie instead of a 3 or 3.5, because it has it.

Made in a time when movies simplify themselves, cater to the least common denominator, and bank on re-makes and sequels and adaptations, Nolan’s movie is an incredibly creative work, and every aspect of it is performed with pristine crispness, as though everyone involved realized its potential and didn’t want to be the weak link.  The cinematographer (Wally Pfister) and film editor (who at one point has to piece together scenes from 4 different locations and dreams states while still keeping us on point) have to be recognized at Oscar time along with Nolan.  Hans Zimmer’s score is an outstanding touch, something else that buzzes around in head long afterwards.  From the actors, there’s not a bad performance here, as supporting characters from Page to Watanabe to Cotillard to Tom Hardy enliven the screen.  But at the center of it all, in almost every scene, is DiCaprio, who trims his performance of any movie-star fat yet still commands the screen.  In a scene at the end, when he closes his eyes and makes his entire body sigh, feeling the weight of his guilt leaving himself, he imparts a bit of his character into everyone in the audience.

The world’s strongest virus, Cobb says, is an idea, because we can’t forget having thought something, and we can’t deny what we believe, even if we rationally think otherwise. So, in your mind, is your top still spinning?  And do you care?

Aside: It’s been a week or two since I’ve published anything for my animation month, in large part because of some serious time-sucking from a class I’m taking plus other miscellany. I don’t guarantee that my rate of posting will be high these next four days before July ends, but I do have a few more articles in the works.

The Annie Awards are essentially the Oscars for animation. Since 1992, they’ve been handing out awards in the category of Best Animated Feature. And, much like the Academy Awards have a bunch of categories I don’t care about (Best Documentary, Best Makeup, anything involving a short film, etc.), The Annies have their fair share of categories that are largely inconsequential: Best Animated Home Entertainment Production (aka Best Straight-to-DVD), Best Animated Short Subject, and a couple more.

There’s also something suspicious about the Annies. It’s more blatantly self-congratulatory than any other awards show I follow. The biggest sponsors for the show are Dreamworks, Disney, Nickelodeon, Sony, Pixar, Warner Bros., and a few other companies: in other words, the people funding the awards are the major recipients. Still, very few of the choices have been illogical, so it’s hard to believe they’re a complete sham.

Looking back over the history of nominations and choices, there are a few frustrating things. (Note that, from this point on, I’m only talking about the Best Animated Feature category.) First is the nomination system, which has chosen anywhere from 1 to 6 films per year to put on the ballot. Also, the films nominated by year weren’t always released in the same calendar year.

For example, The Iron Giant (release date: 8/6/99) won the 1999 award, but Toy Story 2 (11/24/99) won the 2000 award. From that, it seems like the cutoff comes some time between August and November. But then, why was Millennium Actress (9/14/02) honored the same year as Looney Tunes: Back in Action (11/14/03)? There’s just no justifiable logic there.

It’s a shame the set-up of the award is a head-scratcher. From a historical perspective, I would’ve loved to have seen the Annies represent a single calendar year. That would’ve made it easier to develop a snapshot of what animated films were important when. (It also would have been fun to see who would’ve won a duel between the #5 and #4 greatest animated films of all time according to IGN.)

Here’s a list of winners by year. I’ve also included my favorite film of the bunch (that I’ve seen) and, just for kicks, the film with the best rating on IMDb. Again, I want to stress that I don’t really understand the organization by year, at least up until around 2004 when it normalized. Even for those early years, when the groupings by year didn’t really make sense, I’m just sticking with the list of provided nominees.

1992

• Winner: Beauty and the Beast
• Bebe’s Kids
• FernGully: The Last Rainforest
• –
• My pick: Beauty and the Beast
• IMDb’s pick: Beauty and the Beast

1993

• Winner: Aladdin
• Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland
• Once Upon a Forest
• –
• My pick: Aladdin
• IMDb’s pick: Aladdin

1994

A uniformly strong and popular set of nominees this year.

• Winner: The Lion King
• The Nightmare Before Christmas
• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
• –
• My pick: The Lion King
• IMDb’s pick: The Lion King (#144 on IMDb’s top 250 list), edging Nightmare (#237)

1995

A weak year put to shame by ’94.

• Winner: Pocahontas (Disney four years running…)
• A Goofy Movie
• The Swan Princess
• –
• My pick: A Goofy Movie
• IMDb’s pick: A Goofy Movie, surprisingly

1996

Just one nominee, which is kind of strange. But not entirely inappropriate. Honestly, no one else stood a chance. Toy Story was hugely popular, influential, and acclaimed.

• Winner/My Pick/IMDb’s pick: Toy Story (#148)

1997

No clear frontrunner.

• Winner: Cats Don’t Dance
• Hercules
• Space Jam
• –
• My pick: Hercules
• IMDb’s pick: Cat’s Don’t Dance

1998

• Winner: Mulan
• Anastasia
• I Married a Strange Person!
• Quest for Camelot
• –
• My pick: Mulan – but to be fair, I haven’t seen any of the others in their entirety
• IMDb’s pick: Mulan

1999

A very strong year that would be even better if Toy Story 2 was included.

• Winner: The Iron Giant
• A Bug’s Life
• South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut
• Tarzan
• The Prince of Egypt
• –
• My pick: The Iron Giant with apologies to… well, every other nominee, except South Park, which is funny but I don’t adore
• IMDb’s pick: The Iron Giant edging South Park by a hair

2000

A one-horse race unless you dig Chicken Run a lot more than I do.

• Winner: Toy Story 2
• Fantasia 2000
• The Road to El Dorado
• Chicken Run
• Titan A.E.
• –
• My pick: Toy Story 2
• IMDb’s pick: Toy Story 2 (#228)

2001

• Winner: Shrek
• Blood: The Last Vampire
• The Emperor’s New Groove
• Osmosis Jones
• –
• My pick: Shrek though I’m a huge Groove fan
• IMDb’s pick: Shrek

2002

Another great year, one of the best to date.

• Winner: Spirited Away
• Monsters, Inc.
• Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
• Lilo and Stitch
• Ice Age
• –
• My pick: Too close to call between Spirited Away and Monsters, Inc.
• IMDb’s pick: Spirited Away (#57)

2003

• Winner: Finding Nemo
• Brother Bear
• Millennium Actress
• Looney Tunes: Back in Action
• Triplets of Belleville
• –
• My pick: Finding Nemo
• IMDb’s pick: Finding Nemo (#154)

2004

• Winner: The Incredibles
• Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
• Shrek 2
• The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
• –
• My pick: The Incredibles
• IMDb’s pick: The Incredibles (#184)

2005

• Winner: Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit
• Howl’s Moving Castle
• Madagascar
• Chicken Little
• Corpse Bride
• –
• My pick: Wallace & Gromit by a head over Corpse Bride – haven’t seen Howl’s, though
• IMDB’s pick: Howl’s Moving Castle

2006

• Winner: Cars
• Happy Feet
• Monster House
• Open Season
• Over the Hedge
• –
• My pick: Over the Hedge, because it’s charming and I have to choose something
• IMDb’s pick: Cars

2007

• Winner: Ratatouille
• The Simpson’s Movie
• Persepolis
• Surf’s Up
• Bee Movie
• –
• My pick: Ratatouille
• IMDb’s pick: Ratatouille (#168) barely topping Persepolis

2008

Easily the most controversial year. I’ve read a few articles alleging different things – from conspiracy and bribery to stupidity – for Wall-E not winning this award. While I think Wall-E is a bit overvalued and Panda a bit undervalued, the choice is quite baffling given the buzz and respect Wall-E was receiving.

• Winner: Kung Fu Panda
• Wall-E
• Bolt
• $9.99
• Waltz with Bashir
• –
• My pick: Wall-E, though I tip my hat to Panda
• IMDb’s pick: Wall-E (#48)

2009

While the Annies got some buzz in ’08 for choosing the wrong movie, they got some buzz in ’09 for the freaking incredible slate of movies that had come out that year. Seriously, 2009 was the best year for animation ever, and it’s not even close.

• Winner: Up
• Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
• Coraline
• Fantastic Mr. Fox
• The Princess and the Frog
• The Secret of Kells
• My pick: Hard to decide. So stacked. Every one I’ve seen (all except Kells) has a solid claim for one reason or another. I’ll go with Up.
• IMDb’s pick: Up (#84)

2010

The nominations won’t come out for several months, but here are my early projections:

• Projected winner: Toy Story 3
• How to Train Your Dragon
• Despicable Me
• Tangled
• Legend of the Guardians (or possibly Megamind if Guardians tanks)
• The Illusionist (to get something foreign on there)
• –
• My pick: Toy Story 3
• IMDb’s pick: Toy Story 3 (#10 currently… though it will inevitably drop to the mid-40s at the highest)

Taking a break from my month of animation posts, here is a semi-review of Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, Inception. Grant will probably have a more eloquent interpretation and analysis ready in the near future, but here’s mine for now.

Before you read on, I should warn you that this post is spoiler-heavy, and even if it wasn’t, there’s not much intelligent discussion that can be had about Inception until you’ve seen the film. Also, I’ve deliberately not rated the film out of four stars, simply because Inception is so dense that I couldn’t cut to its core enough to fairly evaluate it. Though I loved it, I need to see it again before I can decide whether the film is a masterpiece or simply a convoluted ruse. (The truth is probably somewhere in between.)

Now that I’ve had a day to process my first viewing of it, after the jump are a few takes I had on the film, from the plotting to the subtext, and more.

Inception as a maze of dreams

The title card of Inception has each letter formed from a maze, an image both ironic — because the characters never enter a literal maze (despite some early teases) — and appropriate — because Inception is a labyrinth of storytelling.

My biggest complaint from my first (of likely many) viewings of Inception is voiced quite nicely by Ellen Page partly through the film: “Wait… who’s subconscious are we going into?” A large conceit of the film is that we, as viewers, are never really able to tell what is reality, what is a dream, what is a dream within a dream, what is a dream within a dream within a… and so on. This works as a possibility for clever cinematic deceptions, but also presents the risk of viewer’s not being able to ground themselves in any concrete reality.

The heist-like portion of the film that makes up the bulk of the screen time does its best to lay it out specifically how the dream layers are connected to each other. But just as I felt like I had a handle on truth vs. dream fiction, Nolan introduced another variable, a sort of hyper-dream called “limbo” that turns out to be a key to understanding both Leo DiCaprio’s character and the team’s escape from the “inception” mission.

But the part that’s left unexplained is the assumed level of reality in which we witness Cobb assemble a team and plan the excursion of tremendous depth into the subconscious, and, in turn, the intentionally ambiguous conclusion  that ends the film on a question mark instead of a period that would have been, in many regards, more satisfying.

But Nolan leaving the totem spinning in the final shot is itself a tease and promise of joys to be discovered, but through repeated viewing. Not since The Prestige — another Nolan film, appropriately — have I so immediately desired to return to the film to try and unravel its mysteries. You could criticize this ending that implores repeat viewing as a crass tactic to suck viewers into giving Hollywood even more of their hard-earned dollars, but the film is so fine-tuned and delicately constructed that it’s clearly more of a stylistic decision than a financial decision.

Among the pros of having such a complex machine of a film is that it will be rewatched by fanboys (including myself) for eternity as they try to decipher every line, every facial expression, every frame to discover the truth of Inception’s world. Among the cons are that it requires rules, rules, and more rules. And then there are exceptions to those rules, but there are occasionally exceptions to the exceptions. My brain hurt by the end of the 144 minute run time.

With so many rules set up and dying to be broken, I suspect there will never be a definitive answer to what happened, just as viewers will never be able to fully to piece together what happened in The Usual Suspects. The possibility that we’re witnessing some unknown or merely hinted at exception to the rules already set up will always be present. Any amount of the film could be simply a ruse, a trick of Cobb’s imagination, and the film gleefully plants that ideas in our brain with that final shot.

Inception as a metafilm

Attempting to answer — or at least dismiss as unanswerable — the questions of reality will be my focus for my second viewing, but there are several other layers and wrinkles to Inception, as befitting a film of such concentrated story and direction.

As I watched it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Inception was one of those metafilms; in other words, it’s a movie about the movies. Its notions — of shared dreaming, of clipped and altered reality, of paradoxically unlimited yet strictly controlled fragments of imagination, and of a team of architects and planners and directors — parallel the creation of a movie and the communal joy of experiencing it together in a dark, air-conditioned movie theater.

Just as characters in a dream can never tell you how they literally got from one place to another, so movie viewers never see every transition from one scene to another. We just know that we’re there, and we know approximately where we came from, but we don’t question the specifics such as what route through a city or whether the traffic was bad.

To take this comparison one step further, Page can be seen as something like a conduit between the film and the audience or — to use a term prevalent in the film — a projection of the viewers’ curiosities. She, in general, asks the things we want to know and suggests to us concerns we should have for the characters around her. She’s like an actor but slightly more removed from the entire process.

DiCaprio’s Cobb would then represent some combination of the director and the screenwriters. Page’s Ariadne plunges the depth of Cobb’s subconscious in an attempt to wring out his true meaning. What secrets does he hide behind the show he gives us? Just as she sort-of-almost figures it all out, so the viewers of Inception figure out much of the film by the ending, but never quite all of it.

It’s also crossed my mind that she constructs the final “reality” for Cobb as he sees his children’s faces and returns home. Perhaps the suggestion of the film then is that acclaim and viewer admiration are what provide lifelong joy for filmmakers, even if there’s a certain artificiality and distance in this kind of satisfaction.

To put it another way: Filmmakers look to alter our perception of reality, but because that’s something fully internal to each viewer, these filmmakers can never reap the rewards of this. The best they can do is read reviews or talk to viewers, which gives them nothing more than a hint that they’re accomplishing their creative goals. Cobb is the filmmaker — he’s never quite sure if his work is something real or just a dream-like apparition. Ariadne is the viewer — she tries to sort it all out and construct something comprehensible from it.

Inception as a meditation on family, loss, and mortality

It’s important that many of the key relationships that drive the film are parent-child relationships. There’s Cobb and his kids, Cobb and his step-father, and Robert Fischer, Sr. and Robert Fischer, Jr. It’s also important that the relationship at the very heart of the film as well as the relationship that sets up the film’s overall framework — Cobb and Mal, and Fischer, Sr. and Fischer Jr., respectively — are complicated, bittersweet relationships recently cut off by death.

That sets the film up as one heavily driven by powerful emotion and relationships. The protagonist, Cobb, is constantly battling the demons of guilt and grief that came from a death that he may or may not be responsible for. It’s clear from the beginning that his pinings for Mal are a curse and a blessing; he never wants to forget the one that he loved with all of his heart, but clinging to the past is preventing him from moving forward with his life.

In another way, he’s lost his kids. He can’t even see their faces in his memories, in part because it makes him feel more guilty and in part because he knows his memory of them wouldn’t do justice their beauty. Even when he sees his kids, there’s a feeling that it’s simply a projection of sorts, that he can never regain his ideal version of being a dad.

By the end of the film, we see Cobb  slowly come to grips with the fact that he can’t cling and trap his wife forever in his memory and his guilt. It’s subtly suggested that he’s contemplating suicide all the time, to escape from the agonies of loss rather than cope with them.

The unfolding of Cobb’s delusion and obsession with the past are particularly poignant because they’re literalized — he repeatedly enters his own subconscious and deals with his most troubling demons, over and over and over.

There’s also a sharp contrast between Cobb and Ariadne; the former has gone through the whole spectra of pain and passion, the latter is young and naive. As both the structure of dream-sharing and the burden on Cobb’s soul are gradually revealed to Ariadne, it allows the film to connect with a younger audience. It’s almost as if Cobb provides a snapshot to Ariadne of what older generations can’t explain in words to younger ones: that time, in various ways, alters and amplifies and numbs feelings as we experience them when we’re more raw and guileless.

Because of the film’s pretensions of logically and thoroughly outlining the rules of its universe — then continuously challenging them — this emotional core at times feels diluted or trapped behind a shell of exposition. That’s why Inception, while a tapestry certainly worth revisiting, failed to move me the way Toy Story 3 did. Toy Story 3 had such undiluted yet earned sentiment in its final act that it brought me on the verge of tears, where Inception’s caused more head-scratching than tear-jerking.

Still, Inception is certainly a film built around something. There are real characters here with real stakes, and even when it occasionally feels a bit lost in the shuffle, it’s never forced or tacked on. It’s at the very core of the film.

Inception as a summer blockbuster

As deeply as I attempted to read it, Inception also operates functionally, even exceptionally, as a thrilling summer blockbuster. It’s enjoyable on a basic level, with laughs and gasps and set pieces of astonishing scope and realization.

The centerpiece of the film’s action, and one that deserves to go in every classic action highlight reel (along with the “get down!” scene from Terminator 2 and shootout from The Matrix), is the rotating gravity fight scene with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It’s just awesome to watch the framing of the fight constantly shift, and the combatants seamlessly adapt to the change.

Inception was clearly conceived as a brain-first flick, but for such a movie, it will often strike you as sight-first. The settings are massive, diverse, and stunning, from a snowy mountain to a decayed utopia to the streets of a crowded city (which happens to include a freight train).

Certainly, among the millions of viewers this weekend and in the future, there will be many who turn off their brains and love it for its thrills and gunfights. I’m not actually opposed to this mindset – I think Warner Bros and Nolan have been careful to make this a crowd pleaser as much as a think-tank pleaser, so it’s not like a viewing of the film as sheer fun is any less legitimate than looking at Terminator 2 or The Matrix — also blockbusters with philosophical bents, though to a lesser extent — in the same lens, and that’s surely one reason those films have remained popular through the years.

That’s why I’m confident Inception will pass the test of time quite strongly, even after one viewing. To invoke a cliche, it has its cake and eats it too. It’s indulgently fun if you want it to be. It’s also mind-achingly brainy if you want it to be that, too. The fact that it’s both makes it a grand success, even as plot holes and  contradictions are inevitably discovered in its complex structure.

Love Drunk (2009) – 4 stars  

In the mid-to-late 00s, Boys Like Girls have piggybacked onto the pop-emo scene trail-blazed by bands like the (the infinitely more talented) All-American Rejects.  A genre that has now almost completely abandoned its Rites of Spring roots, emo’s path of change has traversed Sunny Day Real Estate and Weezer and Jimmy Eat World, coming to rest somewhere in between Fall Out Boy (ugh) and AAR, with an eye turned ever towards mainstream acceptance.   

In between those two is BLG, whose self-titled debut proved that there was a healthy market for such music, one likely appealing most to teenage girls.  A fair number of them ate up the predictably over-the-top emotions expressed on said album, which featured a couple sharp, exhilarating tracks that lifted off (“The Great Escape” and “Five Minutes to Midnight” most prominently), but which sank without a trace by the end. 

A 12-song work that should have been 2-4 shorter, with that many more re-worked, Boys Like Girls, at its nadir, exemplifies the worst traits of this kind of schmaltzy pop-rock.  The lyrics sustain that kind of immature, woe-is-me attitude—“Who said it’s better to have loved and lost? / I wish that I had never loved at all,” etc—that, apparently, people still find poignant.  When the melodies fade away, there’s not much left in the songs’ originality or sturdiness to make up for it, and lead singer Martin Johnson’s voice just gets thinner and thinner.  The aforementioned two opening tracks, plus a couple more, are worth downloading, but that’s about it.

All of which makes their 2009 sophomore release, Love Drunk, that much more surprising.  This is a massive step forward, though not via a significant musical shift.  Indeed, it’s merely the other end of the spectrum, projecting the best feelings in emo-pop.  This is what they should have always gone for, the kind of loud, hyper-melodic, blood-pumping, Top Gun-style-campy music that’s best belted out loudly from the car.  When they sing “We’re heading for a heart, heart, heartbreak” or “I used to be love drunk, but now I’m hung-over” or “I wish that I could turn this car around, but she’s got a boyfriend now,” they sound carefree instead of overly caring, closer to delighted than despondent, loose rather than lost. 

And THAT is the critical distinction—and the philosophical bent that really makes the album work.  Self-misery would have sunk this project—and it wouldn’t have fit with the music—but the freewheeling thoughts blend together perfectly with the anthemic choruses to actually uplift you.  When I saw some of these song titles (particularly “She’s Got a Boyfriend Now”) I nervously foresaw some Pinkerton or Narrow Stairs-esque lyrics; instead, they treat such situations as opportunities for freedom and novelty.

And they marry such sentiments to songs whose ability to withstand repeated playings, I’ll be honest, stunned me.  Thanks to the playfulness and energy, the vastly improved hooks, and the fact that the songs are now drenched in color rather than projecting the same boring hue, they’re able to stir up that feeling of grand romanticism to which many similar bands only aspire.  Despite re-using some elements (start-stop basslines, falsettos), their previously-dormant sense of songcraft masks flaws: Tracks like the opener and “Chemicals Collide” are as good of stress-relievers as I’ve heard. 

No, Allmusic, “Two is Better Than One” (sung with Taylor Swift, but whatever) isn’t the worst of the ballads on here, for at least it has some punch and a decent grip on melody.  It has tangible flaws, to be sure, but the real penetrating stares should be directed at the tracks that most recall the second half of their debut: “Someone Like You” and “Go,” which commits that crime of all music crimes, the limpid album closer. (Why, oh why, don’t bands just dance with what brought them?  I’m looking at you, Jawbox.   And Placebo.)

So, on some level, Love Drunk is what it is, but deep down, it’s not.  Much as the snobby will hate it, this kind of music can be bad or good, depending on its execution, just like all rock can be.  Their career has proved that.  But for the most part, this is very well-executed—and fun.

In a lot of ways, this kind of music compares with country.  There’s not a ton going on, musically, which redirects attention onto the vocals and lyrics.  And, perhaps for that reason, the attitude and philosophy of the genre—the culture, if you will—is presented so forcefully as to feel like it’s being shoved down your right.  Your appreciation, therefore, will be highly dependent upon your approval of that culture.  But if you’re OK with it—and you’re finished with all 3 All-American Rejects albums—turn here.

Neon Trees opened for The Killers in 2008, inviting a natural comparison to a band they clearly respect.  A couple years later, the Trees are playing a gig at the upcoming Lollapalooza concerts, their lead single “Animal” gets some radio play, and…they’re also plugging Las Vegas vacations.  OK, so they haven’t become Killers-level huge yet, but there’s enough on Habits, their debut LP, to suggest they can.  

Whooshing through in a breezy 29 minutes, Habits is a fairly by-the-books dance-pop-rock album, with lots of nods to imperfect relationships and some endearingly catchy hooks.  Yet the Trees manage to sound both mainstream and independent—like they’re doing their own thing, and it just happens to sound like this.  “Animal” is suitably indie-quirky, with dance-friendly synths and a come-and-get-me refrain—“Oh, oh, I want some more / What are you waiting for? / Take a bite of my heart tonight”—but it tends to grate a little under heavy repetition.  Fortunately, quality-wise, it’s really only in the middle of the pack here. 

The real stand-out is the follow-up, “Your Surrender,” where U2 meets Rooney, with a hint of the Arcade Fire thrown in underneath. (If this sounds as appealing to you as it does me, buy this album; otherwise, don’t.) It works primarily because the refrain eschews that annoying sense of worthlessness found in too many of these songs, adopting instead the same kind of mischievousness as “Animal,” but with more confidence—“How long till your surrender?”

What truly sets Habits apart from its contemporaries in the somewhat-amateurish danceable post-punk scene, what makes it sound less pre-packaged than you’d expect, are the surprising shades of gray lurking underneath the songs.  Neon Trees manage to infuse these songs with more than a few traces of muffled darkness, as though coming from just under a pillow, a technique that works effectively against their natural pop leanings.  Songs like “Sins of My Youth,” “Girls and Boys in School,” and “Our War” bring forth cloudier arrangements than one might expect, which helps them sustain repeated plays.  Of most interest is closer “War,” a touching near-ballad both uplifting (particularly in the vocals) and tantalizing, as one can envision it having been further developed at the hands of a more refined band.

Other worthy tracks include “1983” (sometimes, they don’t hide their influences all that much), with legitimately striking twists and turns; but, the thing is, with an eight-song album, you’d better have a very high batting average.  Allmusic calls “Love and Affection” pure Bloc Party, but all it sounds like to me is a forced melody and those aforementioned irritating attitudes—the “I just don’t understand why my love isn’t good enough” kind. 

That’s the only truly skippable song here, but a fair number of tracks combine traits with faults (formulaic ‘soaring’ choruses, uninspired lyrics, similar sounds); they’d do well to freeze-frame the “Fuck all the rest and forget the rules!” coda of “Girls,” their strongest boundary-pushing moment here.  In the meantime, though, if you have an itch for this kind of music—and especially with Rooney’s Eureka looking like a disappointment—feel free to enjoy Neon Trees for what they are, rather than asking them to be something else.

This post is part of The Month of Animated Features.

Without thinking too much about it, what’s your gut answer to the headline?

Once you take a close look at the catalog of animated features released over the years, the answer becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly. First, let’s examine this question in terms of rigid numeric decades — e.g. “the 1950′s” would be eligible, but 1967-1976 would not be.

Before I reveal what I believe is the clearly correct answer, let me go over how I evaluated each decade. As a reminder, I’m concerned mostly with enduring artistic quality and entertainment value, as opposed to issues separate from the product itself, like influence, technical innovation, or reputation.

Perhaps we should look first at the peak films of each decade. Generating an list of five of the best animated features from each decade should make it a little bit more clear which decades stand out as particularly weak or strong. We’ll start with the 1940′s, since that was the first complete decade with American-released animated films. (Lists in no particularly order.)

• 1940′s: Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, Dumbo, and… umm… Bugville?
• 1950′s: Cinderella, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan, and Animal Farm (UK)
• 1960′s: Yellow Submarine (UK) and 101 Dalmations. Then… The Jungle Book? The Phantom Toolbooth? Gay Purr-ee?
• 1970′s: Allegro Non Troppo (Italy), Fritz the Cat, Watership Down, Fantastic Planet (Fr.), and Heavy Traffic
• 1980′s: The Little Mermaid, Akira, Castle in the Sky (Jap.), Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and The Secret of NIMH
• 1990′s: Toy Story, Toy Story 2, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Princess Mononoke (Jap.) [just to have something non-Disney]
• 2000′s: Wall-E, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Shrek, and Spirited Away (Jap.)

Upon looking at those lists, there are a few obvious cuts. The 1960′s go out the door first, quickly followed by the 1970′s. The 1940′s have a tremendous top four, but thin quickly afterwards, so they have to go, too. The 1950′s, 1980′s, 1990′s, and 2000′s all seem worth consideration.

But if you start trying to come up with the five next best films from each of those decades, it becomes obvious two decades really warrant consideration for the top spot.

• 1950′s: Alice in Wonderland… followed by… maybe the claymation cult favorite Hansel and Gretel? The Sword in the Stone? That’s about it.
• 1980′s: My Neighbor Totoro (Jap.), Grave of the Fireflies (Jap.), Barefoot Gen (Jap.), The King and the Mockingbird (Fr.), and… that’s it?
• 1990′s: Aladdin, Tarzan, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Iron Giant, and A Bug’s Life
• 2000′s: Up, Finding Nemo, Howl’s Moving Castle, Kung Fu Panda, and Monsters Inc.

So, assuming you want at least ten great-or-borderline-great films from whatever decade you choose, the only real contenders here are the 1990′s and the 2000′s. You could argue that I’m biased because that’s really the only time I was watching movies, but I think the lists back me up.

(Quick sidebar that will receive expansion later: There is a very compelling conclusion from this observation: Animated film has been better the past two decades than it ever was before that, period. This statement will probably bother some purists and historians — the ones who dubbed 1918-1960 the so-called “Golden Age” of animation.)

So, which decade of these two is it, then? Just looking at the ten films as the best from each decade, even if there were a few that I missed that you’d have included, it seems relatively balanced. So I will go through a few more bits of evidence.

• Exhibit  A: The Annies — a set of annual awards given out for excellent work in animation — were instituted in 1991, when they nominated three films for Best Animated Feature. Starting in 1998, they expanded the nominations to four or five pictures, peaking with six nominations in 2009.
• Exhibit B: The Academy Awards added the category “Best Animated Feature” in 2001.
• Exhibit C: According to Rotten Tomates — if you count only movies with 20 or more reviews — the 1990′s had 12 animated films with a 90%+ critical approval, whereas 2000′s had 21 animated films with a 90%+ critical approval. If you expand this to all films with at least five reviews, the minimum required by RT for a movie to have a valid approval rating, then the 1990′s have 16 and the 2000′s have 28 with 90%+ critical approval. Bring this bar down to 80%, and the 1990′s had 29, while 2000′s had 58.
• Exhibit D: On the IMDb poll, the 1990′s have 12 on the list of the 50 most popular animated films. The 2000′s have 21 on the list.

You could find reasons to ignore any one of these on their own, but the more you stare at the facts — and look at lists of films from each decade — the more clear it becomes that there was a serious expansion in the quality, credibility, and breadth of animation in 2000′s; this is evidenced by the number of popular films and the increased industry respect through more Annie nominations and the Academy Award category.

Look closely at which films were released when, and you have trouble finding great animated films in the first half of the 1990′s not produced by Disney. The Annie Awards in particular are pretty revealing. I can tell you with pretty strong confidence that Space Jam, Ferngully, Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumber Land, The Swan Princess, and Once Upon a Forest — all Best Animated Feature nominees — would never have been nominated in the 2000′s in any year. They’re decent, but not quite best-of-the-year material. For most of the 1990′s, it seems like The Annies struggled to find at least three options. (And in 1996, they didn’t even try — they just gave it to Toy Story.)

To spin it one last way, the weakest year for animation in the 2000′s was probably 2004, with 2003 not far behind. Only 1999 (TS2, The Iron Giant, Tarzan) from the 90′s definitively tops them. Every other year from 1990′s was weaker than every year from the 2000′s.

There’s just a richer, more diverse group of studios and film-makers using animation these past ten years than ever. The result is the strongest slate of animated movies, and it’s honestly not even close. Credit the 1990′s for reviving the medium and for providing what will remain some of the most cherished animated films of all time. But don’t let nostalgia for the Disney masterpieces plus the merely decent non-Disney fairy tales that filled theaters trick you into choosing it as a stronger overall decade.

So, to answer the question raised in the headline: the 2000′s (with the 2010′s projecting to at least match it) were the greatest, with the 1990′s taking silver, and the 1980′s taking bronze. That’s a nice upward trend that excites me about the next few years.

A question with a less clear-cut answer is “What set of 10 years gave us the best animation?” For this discussion, I will allow 2010. I know we’re only six-and-a-half months into the year, but 2010 has been so good for animation so far that this half year trumps most other full years.

So, there are two answers for which I think you can make a really good case: 1999-2008 and 2001-2010. The problem is that 1999 and 2009 were two of the best years ever for animation, and they’re just far enough apart that you can’t include both of them.

These two spans obviously have a lot of overlap, so let’s consider the films not included in both of these categories. From 1999-2000 — so in the first span, but not the second — you have Toy Story 2, The Iron Giant, Tarzan, The Emperor’s New Groove, Chicken Run, and Fantasia 2000 probably in that order in terms of significance. In 2009-2010 — in the second span, but not the first — you get Toy Story 3, How to Train Your Dragon, Up, Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Princess and the Frog, Despicable Me, and The Secret of Kells.

Again, I hate to be that brat who becomes infatuated with the present and overlooks the past, but I have to side with the more recent 2001-2010. I can pretty confidently say that the past ten years have been the best overall years for animation ever.

Note: I bet you’re wondering why I included a frame from The Sword and the Stone, of the 1950′s. One reason is that Merlin’s looking ponderous, as appropriate for a post with a question for a headline. The other, more prominent reason is that I forgot to bring up the film in my overview of Disney during “The Golden Age” and wanted to give it some recognition. A glaring omission of a pretty good film.

“With Inception hitting theaters, we take a look at movies that take a dark view of the future.”  So declared the Rotten Tomatoes website today, and in the same spirit, I revisit 2006′s criminally underappreciated sci-fi classic.

Every once in a while, a movie comes out that puts together every aspect of cinema so magnificently that you can’t imagine how it could be better.  Such movies don’t remind you why you go to the theater; any solid one can do that.  Such movies instead remind you of the transcendental power of cinema, the life-affirming revelation that all great literature, music, and movies can possess when constructed by masters.  Children of Men is such a movie.  Upon its release, this was the best film to come out since 2004.

Based on the science fiction book by P.D. James, Men is set in Britain in 2027, when the world is exactly like ours but for one crucial difference: humans are infertile.  No one under 18 years old is alive.  The government passes out suicide kits with the slogan, “You decide when.”  With no prospects for long-term survival, anarchy is the rule around the world.  Britain arrives at the most successful method for handling the situation by prohibiting immigration, deporting and locking up any illegals, and enforcing a police state.  A walk to work is an opportunity to be attacked by a rabid police dog.  A visit to a coffee shop in the morning might be your last.  Is it the lack of innocent children that corrupts people?  Or the sheer fact that there’s nothing to live for?   

Clive Owen prefers to play amoral characters, and he has a particular affinity for people who derive strength from destruction occurring around them (see Croupier, Closer).  Yet here it is the rest of the world that has fallen apart while he ultimately finds a measure of decency and redemption.  He plays Theo Faron, an ex-activist now resorting to mindlessness.  He carries too much suffering from his past to be bothered by the death of the youngest person alive, which captivates everyone else.  His ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore) takes him out of his shell by arranging for him to be the caretaker of Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey, solid), an African woman who miraculously is pregnant.  The government wants no part of any foreigners, and rebel groups want to use the baby for political purposes, so it is left to Theo to keep her safe and deliver her to the Human Project, an organization dedicated to planning for the future.   

The set-up might seem a perfect opportunity to lionize Theo, but the movie never makes that mistake.  He’s a broken-down man who fights for Kee because she reminds him of the child he and Julian had together who died at the age of two.  Children of Men, though, is less a character analysis than a study of the human condition.  Theo speaks to both the ways that society and culture can shape an individual’s behavior and to the extent to which one can forge his own path.  Theo, having endured too much pain at the hands of fate, has withdrawn from life at the beginning, but the arrival of a baby transforms him, most notably in a stunning scene in which he delivers the child.  But there are also smaller decisions he makes independent of fate, which together are the main reason you walk out of the theater feeling good about humanity amidst the terror and carnage.

In many respects, Children of Men is an adventure story, as Theo and Kee, with a midwife named Miriam (Pam Ferris), have to escape and evade the violence surrounding them, but it is filled with so many rich scenes and tender moments of humanity that it transcends its genre.  Though a violent rebel group named the Fishes wrecks their plans more than once, there is no battle against a specific enemy here.  This is a battle against the world, against our human flaws, against apathy, against dangers that we bring upon ourselves. 

Director Alfonso Cuaron allows us to see small measures of goodness amidst the carnage: how people try to replace children the best they can with pets—dogs, kittens, sheep, roosters, goats, and birds roam the squalid streets and buildings—as though they must care for something.  After Kee’s baby is born, it is Theo, not the mother, who knows how to care for the baby; he’s done it before, but no one Kee’s age has even seen a child.  And Jasper (Michael Caine, also impressive), Theo’s best friend who deals with the end of the world with strawberry-flavored weed and classic British music, provides some levity but also deeply cares for his catatonic wife, a former journalist who was tortured, probably for exposing the nasty ways of the government.  In both the sunshine in his scenes that belies the generally grey and dark blue hues of London and in Theo’s rare laughter around him, viewers can observe how much joy Jasper brings.     

None of this, however, can obscure the movie’s darkness.  It makes a statement about what would happen with no children to keep us innocent and no accountability for adults’ actions to keep our base desires in check.  It’s not political, but the implications of the anti-immigrant policy reverberate, particularly in a startlingly close to home depiction of a refugee camp that would not be out of place in today’s news.  In another poignant scene, Miriam explains to Theo what the gradual awareness of infertility felt like, in an abandoned school where the playground is desolate except for the quiet humming and singing of Kee, reflecting her divorce from the rest of society.  “I was there for the end,” Miriam says, and Theo, watching Kee swing, replies, “And now you can be there for the beginning.”  He wants her to relish that, but this movie informs us that this wouldn’t necessarily be enjoyable if we continued to acted like this.

All the touches from the hand of Cuaron, who collaborated with four others on the screenplay as well, have a revelatory effect: the chilling music that underlies a cold shot of a London alleyway before Theo and Kee traverse it; a camera shot that lingers for a moment on a kitten crawling up Theo’s leg; the high-pitched ringing noise in Theo’s ears, reflecting his proximity to a prior bombing, that ominously plays periodically throughout the movie.  Even when you don’t think Cuaron’s doing anything, he is, be it through purposeful background music, a camera splattered with blood, or a vivid, single-shot presentation of a car attacked from all sides using a hand-held camera.  He understands the power of creating a world in which you can lose yourself for a couple hours.  So many movies fail to take advantage of scenery and background, existing in nondescript places, but cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and Cuaron create a London 20 years from now—complete with houses literally barricaded from the outside world, billboards declaring that avoiding fertility tests is a crime, and bone-shattering explosions in coffee shops—that stays with you long after the credits roll.

And the last ten minutes are by themselves more emotionally affecting than most movies taken as a whole, one of the top five most affecting segments I’ve ever seen on film.  From the moment when the cries of Kee’s baby silence a squadron of government troops pounding a rebel hangout to the concluding scene in a boat, Children of Men goes from being a great movie to an exceptional one.  Hope mixes with despair, as the desires of the soldiers to get a look at the baby are diverted by a bomb from the rebels and as Theo shows Kee how to hold the baby amidst fighter planes lighting up the morose sky.  In his face as he carries the two girls away from danger, it is also, once again, apparent that Clive Owen plumbs emotional depths that few other actors can.  He resists the natural urge to look sanctimonious, or foolishly proud, or smug; instead, he cares about nothing more than protecting them, and his eyes simply gaze outward, as though looking towards the future.  He looks real—battered and bruised but finally stable.  For the first time in many years, he’s happy that he opened his eyes in the morning—just like us.

Although I’m primarily concerned with the lasting creative merits of a film, I do find it fascinating and valuable to observe the “influence” on a film. When I use this term, I mean its effect on future animated features (to date, that is; I tried to not include projection into the future), as well as the public perception of animation.

This list is concerned with influence on American animation. Foreign animated film has been considered, and in a few cases included, based on its effect on the Hollywood culture of animation.

Among criteria I looked for were: unique artistic achievement later mimicked, technical advances, commercial success (because Hollywood follows the money), cultural ubiquity, and the setting or altering of trends.

Again: This isn’t a list of the greatest animated films or my favorite animated films. My goal was simply to look at a film’s overall effect on how later films were and are made.

My list of twenty, sorted chronologically, after the jump.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937)

This list is ordered chronologically, but if it were order by ranking, Snow White would still be first. Simply, it created the animation feature as we understand it today. Though it wasn’t the first animated feature ever made, there’s a long list of “firsts” it did achieve, including “first American animated film” and “first fully color animated film.”

Snow White established animation as a commercially viable film style and also set numerous standards for animation that are largely followed to this day, including a fairy-tale setting and a heavy use of musical numbers. Most importantly, it proved the animated feature could be an aesthetically and emotionally valuable art form.

Pinocchio (1940)

Darker, richer, and superior to Snow White, Pinocchio was received coolly by audiences at the point of its initial release despite glowing praise from critics. Some of the animation techniques achieved here have never been attempted since. Over time, it has come to be revered by many as the most significant animated feature ever released and has served as inspiration to thousands of storytellers, including influential animators of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Fantasia (1940)

In many ways, Fantasia’s failure was on a similar order of magnitude to Snow White’s success. It lost Disney millions, and it remained one of its kind for many years. But the short film stories set to classical music broke ground visually, using utterly unique visual styles that have been borrowed from the movie and expanded with full narratives ever since.

The film also foreshadowed surround sound by requiring theaters use an impractical but fully engrossing multichannel system not entirely different in concept from what you hear in theaters today.

Bambi (1942)

Bambi was a film set entirely in nature, and animators and cinematographers still consider it one of the all-time masterpieces in luscious, languid depiction of the outdoors. Its storytelling was also ambitious and influential, both in its multi-year arc and its depiction of tragedy in the scene of the death of Bambi’s mother. Even post-Mufasa, that scene remains the landmark in heart-breaking animated storytelling.

Cinderella (1950)

For the better part of the century, Disney was American feature animation. Few other studios attempted fully animated features, and those that did rarely saw more than a minor profit. But Disney’s animation studio – and, by proxy, large-budget animated films – could have come to an end in the early ‘50s if not for the enormous success of Cinderella. Disney’s multi-million dollar gamble paid off.

Cinderella also set a huge precedent, for better and worse, by making the soundtrack of a film an important part of the film design and marketing equation.

Sleeping Beauty (1959)

After a relatively prosperous decade for Disney, he made another big gamble, except this time it backfired. Sleeping Beauty was envisioned by Walt as the pinnacle of all animated features, to surpass his own Pinocchio, Snow White, and Bambi. While, visually, the film comes close to fulfilling its prophecy, the narrative runs thinner than the movies’ box office success, which was close to nothing.

Sleeping Beauty altered the animation landscape by suggesting that beautiful, operatic fairy tales are not the best way to approach features; verbal whimsy beats out visual enchantment. Sleeping Beauty signaled a close for the golden age of animated features and the beginning of the sketch-outlined dark ages.

101 Dalmations (1961)

Dalmations was the first successful animated film to be set in the modern era. It was also the first to use a new, more efficient type of film called “xerography” that gave a new, sketchy look to figures. Refined versions of this technique would be used repeatedly until the advancement of computers as a prominent animation aid in the mid-to-early ‘90s.

Fritz the Cat (1972)

The first animated film to receive an X rating was a surprise hit. In an age full of mediocre-to-average animated family-fare, Fritz the Cat opened up animation as an outlet for filmmakers interested in adult-oriented, raunchy comedies. Since then, these alternative animated features have frequented theaters. Without Fritz the Cat, there may be no South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut or Team America. There also might not be an English translation of Akira (see below), which may mean no American anime explosion of the ‘90s and aughts.

The Secret of NIMH (1982)

The Secret of NIMH is the pebble that eventually caused the animation revival of the 1990’s. Animator Don Bluth, fed up with not receiving enough credit or respect from Disney as well as the studio’s artistic ambivalence, jumped ship to start his own animation studio. Secret achieved production and design values that were off the charts considering its almost non-existent budget and the low bar set by animated features from the previous two decades. For the first time in a long time, it seemed there was American animation truly worth watching.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

The Little Mermaid gets more of the credit these days, but Who Framed Rober Rabbit (debatable as its status as “animated” may be) laid much of the groundwork for the Disney Renaissance of 1989-99. A tremendously unique and entertaining film – its combination of live actors and animated “toons” has rarely been attempted since – Roger Rabbit brought in both cash and optimism to a Disney animation studio on the verge of being closed forever.

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Akira (1988)

Akira condensed down to two hours a six-volume graphic novel epic, to the point that many critics from the novel’s home in Japan thought the film attempted too much and lost much of the novel’s power in translation from paper to celluloid. It was no matter to American audiences; the film slowly but surely gained popularity in the US. An explosion of interest in Japanese “manga” – graphic novels – and “anime” – animated film or TV – followed and hasn’t died since. A side effect of this has been a stylistic reinvention by many animators to include a more eastern influence.

The Little Mermaid (1989)

The Little Mermaid ranks perhaps third on this list behind Snow White and Toy Story. Since the 1930s, animated features have prominently featured songs. But it wasn’t until The Little Mermaid that they did so Broadway style. Featuring some of the toe-tappingest songs ever heard on film, The Little Mermaid was the biggest success for Disney in decades.

Improvements in xerography got rid of those pesky black outlines dating back to 101 Dalmations. This allowed the film to escape its sketchbook feel and return to storybook lusciousness at greater efficiency than in animation’s early years.

Lastly, heroine Ariel signaled a shift away from submissive, matronly princesses towards spunky, identity-questioning ladies. Though there are still some critics of Disney’s handling of gender issues, improvement certainly began here. Finally we had a “Disney Princess” for young audiences to identify with instead of sympathize with.

Launching a new era for a Disney animation studio that would quickly regain juggernaut status, The Little Mermaid also saw a revival in interest in animation from everyone: the media, talented artists, investors, and – perhaps most importantly to Disney’s legacy – children.

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

Beauty and the Beast expanded the Broadway success of The Little Mermaid and returned animation to where it started: dark and scary forests. It also brought a carefully developed, complex romance that put the shallowness of Snow White’s love story to shame.

Proving that The Little Mermaid was no fluke, and that Disney really was back, bigger and better than ever, Beauty and the Beast gained momentum for animation in whole. The medium was regarded with new artistic and critical appreciation. Beast remained the only animated film to be nominated for Best Picture during the five-nomination era that ended in 2010.

The Lion King (1994)

Just as Rafiki the baboon held Simba up as the new king of Pride Rock in the awe-inspiring opening number, so audiences lifted The Lion King as the king of animated film. To this day, no hand-drawn animated taken in more at the box office.

Creatively, The Lion King covered almost as much ground as it did commercially. With a strong African influence in its narrative and art style, King was different and ambitious enough to reaffirm animation’s claim to the throne as a medium for timeless, popular storytelling.

Lastly, The Lion King has a dark undercurrent reminiscent of Disney’s early and best work. The death of Simba’s father Mufasa may not trump the death of Bambi’s mother om terms of ubiquity, but in terms of emotional potency, it holds the throne for moving and heartbreaking animation deaths (with only the opening of Up as a viable threat). The story has a strong Shakesperean feel, in part because many of its voice actors were classically trained, but mostly because storytellers intentionally incorporated elements of the plot of Hamlet.

Toy Story (1995)

The only film you can aptly compare Toy Story to is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Pixar’s success was just as unprecedented, popular, profound, and unexpected as Disney’s debut 57 years earlier. Just as Snow White set all of the rules for animated features, so Toy Story set all the rules for CGI features. Just as Snow White thrived more on inventiveness of storytelling and visual design than as a showcase of new technology, so the narrative and characterization of Toy Story was exceptionally well-crafted coming from a bunch of computer programmers. Etc.

The Iron Giant (1999)

At the turn of the millennium, good money was still on the Broadway-esque fairy tale as the ruler of hand-drawn animation. Brad Bird, an animator for Warner Bros, thought otherwise. His cold war tale about the silliness (at best) and devastation (at worst) of paranoia had very little traction in the box office in part because of poor marketing strategies and in part because of its distinction from the Disney slapstick, theatrical norm.

But among animators and, eventually, on home videos, The Iron Giant became a legend, with many regarding it as the best hand-drawn animated film of the second half of the ‘90s, if not the entire decade. Cartoon Network started a tradition of airing it on loop on Thanksgiving Day, and it has since grown a large following. Without The Iron Giant, many of the most ambitious animated films of the next decade may have seemed impossible, and the aughts may not have ended up the best decade for animation ever.

Toy Story 2 (1999)

With critical darlings now coming from Pixar every summer as reliably as the scorching hot sun and visits to the beach, it’s easy to forget people still doubted Pixar at the end of the 1990’s. The conditions of Toy Story 2’s production all pointed to impending turbulence, if not outright failure.

But Toy Story 2 is the trickiest act to pull, a follow-up which deepens the premise and characters of the original without feeling like a rehash. It not only secured Pixar’s place as king of the CGI feature, but opened up all of animation to more profound stories. The undercurrent of mortality and existential confusion in Toy Story 2 – which would have been impressive even in a live action drama, but seemed impossible in a children’s adventure-comedy – set a new bar for the quality expected from animated film.

Shrek (2001)

Aside from launching the most successful animated franchise of all time, Shrek set numerous precedents that moviegoers now take for granted.

First, Shrek derived much of its humor from parodies and references of popular culture tropes, especially those Disney fairy tales that were before an untouchable part of nostalgia. Almost every non-Pixar CGI film has thrived on a pop-reference type of comedy since, with none matching the entertainment value of Shrek’s exuberant dismantling of the Disney mystique.

Next, the 2001 comedy finally gave DreamWorks an outright success. The company had seen moderate commercial and creative successes since its launch in 1998, but nothing to suggest a phenomenon on the level of Shrek was possible. Since Shrek, DreamWorks has produced one bankroller after another.

Also, the tone of Shrek was slightly irreverent and suggestive. Though it maintained a PG rating, there are jokes – such as a memorable one with Shrek theorizing Lord Farquad’s large castle is compensating for something else – that seem more out of an adult comedy.

Lastly, Shrek re-popularized the voice stunt casting technique. Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, and Cameron Diaz were all bankable stars at the time, and Shrek’s enormous popularity has been attributed at least in part to their presence.

Spirited Away (2002)

Hayao Miyazaki made films prior to Spirited Away, but never one as popular or revered, nor one as impactful. The unprecedented success in Japan and reverence among animators allowed Spirited Away to enter US markets with something of a splash. It eventually won the Best Animated Picture Oscar – the only international film to do so, to date.

Now Miyazaki’s film are regularly released in the United States, and there’s a new interest in international feature animation. Many Americans and animation fans have come to hold Miyazaki and the Ghibli Studio he often produces films for in a higher esteem than either Disney or Pixar. His widespread recognition would not have been possible without Spirited Away. Further, the new emphasis on international animation has given a palette of new art styles that American animators have used.

Ratatouille (2007)

The second Brad Bird film and third Pixar film on this list, Ratatouille was an important film for Pixar and for animation in general for a variety of reasons. Pixar was coming off of its first-ever public backlash after the meandering and overwrought Cars failed to deliver the magic on the level that the public had come to expect from the studio, even as it still serviced as an above-average animated film.

But moreso, Ratatouille again upped the ante on the artistry possible in animation. The story, perhaps too complex and rich thanks to a rocky development, again expanded the boundaries in visual storytelling and characterization. Further, its hero is the unlikeliest of heroes, in that it would’ve been hard to predict mass audiences sympathizing with a street rat, especially one who aspires to make food as a chef

Ratatouille lifted animation even further in the stratosphere, where it has remained. The three years since Ratatouille was released have unquestionably been the three strongest years for animated films in terms of maturity and quantity of artistically valuable features.

Honorable mentions:

The Prince of Egypt (1998), Dumbo (1941), The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1916), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Animal Farm (1954), Beavis and Butthead Do America (1996), Yellow Submarine (1968), The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979)

So what did you think of the films I included? Any surprise inclusions or exclusions? Share your thoughts in the comments.