{"id":3903,"date":"2025-02-17T19:20:11","date_gmt":"2025-02-17T19:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3903"},"modified":"2025-02-17T19:20:11","modified_gmt":"2025-02-17T19:20:11","slug":"oscars-2025-the-wild-robot-and-flow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2025\/02\/17\/oscars-2025-the-wild-robot-and-flow\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscars 2025: The Wild Robot and Flow"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m also trying to see all the nominees for Best Animated Feature. Inside Out 2<\/em> is wonderful entertainment despite not being a patch on the original, which just emphasises what a tremendously strong piece of work the original is. Vengeance Most Fowl<\/em> is Wallace and Gromit at very nearly their best, and one barely notices the absence of Peter Sallis. I\u2019m very excited about Memoir of a Snail<\/em>, having been knocked out by the same team\u2019s Mary and Max<\/em> some years ago. That leaves The Wild Robot<\/em> and Flow<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In their different ways, these are both painterly CG animations about the collision between nature and the modern world, with a largely animal cast and driven by a singular creative talent. But despite these superficial similarities they function in very different ways, although I\u2019m pleased to say I think they\u2019re both terrific.<\/p>\n

The Wild Robot<\/strong> is the latest offering from mad genius Chris Sanders, who was let off the leash back when Disney was earning All Of The Money to make Lilo & Stitch<\/em>, possibly my favourite post-renaissance 2D Disney movie. After a period in the wilderness, he came back with How to Train Your Dragon<\/em>, and also has (sigh) a live action Lilo & Stitch<\/em> coming out soon. Meanwhile, he\u2019s cast Lupita Nyong’o as \u201cRoz\u201d, a silicon help-meet who mysteriously washes up on the shore of an uninhabited island. With echoes of both WALL-E<\/em> and The Iron Giant<\/em>, Roz grapples with what her purpose is, and (having spent days learning their language) turns to various animal friends for help.<\/p>\n

This is pretty breezy, family-friendly, crowd-pleasing stuff, but an exceptional voice cast (including Pedro Pascal as a wily fox, Catherine O\u2019Hara as a hilarious possum, Matt Berry as a neurotic beaver and Mark Hamill as a grizzly bear) and some absolutely gorgeous animation elevate this to classic status, and the script knows just when to go for the gag and when to pluck on your heart strings.<\/p>\n

It reportedly cost around $80m which is cheap for a major CG movie. Flow<\/strong> was made for less than a tenth of that, and it\u2019s almost impossible to tell. This Latvian animation was created by a tiny Latvian\/Parisian team on consumer-grade equipment and tells the entirely worldless story of a tiny grey cat making friends (secretarybird, golden retriever and capybara mainly) in order to escape mysteriously rising flood waters. Again, the CG images have been given a painterly sheen, and whereas in the American movie, I\u2019m convinced this is entirely for artistic reasons, here I think it may have been in part to conceal the relative simplicity of the digital models. But when the animation is so simultaneously characterful and accurate to the natural world, this seems like a pointless thing to quibble about.<\/p>\n

My taste for magical realism, which at points strays in to surrealism, isn\u2019t quite as well developed as that of director Gints Zilbalodis, but for the most part, this is a gorgeous, enthralling, sweetly beguiling story of friendship and adventure which never for a moment feels like dialogue would have added anything at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m also trying to see all the nominees for Best Animated Feature. Inside Out 2 is wonderful entertainment despite not being a patch on the original, which just emphasises what a tremendously strong piece of work the original is. Vengeance Most Fowl is Wallace and Gromit at very nearly their best, and one barely notices […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[12,13,19],"class_list":["post-3903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","tag-movies","tag-oscars","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-10X","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3903"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3904,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3903\/revisions\/3904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}