Tumult in Toon Town

By RICHARD CORLISS

Where have all the pixels gone? That's what cartoon mavens were asking about the Oscar finalists for animated feature. At a time when computer-generated imagery (CGI) bedazzles the box office, when Disney dumps its 75-year-old traditional-animation unit and spends $7.4 billion to buy CGI leader Pixar, the three nominees are defiantly old-fashioned and handcrafted: two delightful stop-motion movies--Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride--as well as a hand-drawn fantasy, Howl's Moving Castle, from Japanimator Hayao Miyazaki. Meanwhile, three big-studio CGI hits--DreamWorks' Madagascar, Disney's Chicken Little and Fox's Robots--got shut out.

You could say the category's voters (316 animation professionals) were in synch with this year's overall Oscar mood: ignore the mainstream hits, and reward quality work in the little films. (Hi there, Brokeback Mountain! Bye-bye, Narnia!) But the resentment of cartoon veterans toward the CGI style that put them out of business could play a part. "A lot of animators are older, and computers have a stigma," says Tim Miller, creative director of Blur Studio, which copped a nomination last year for its short Gopher Broke. "I hate seeing political motivation influencing what's chosen." Perhaps the main reason no CGI film was nominated is that Pixar postponed the release of Cars--its only feature scheduled for 2005--to 2006. But the other CGI studios still won where it counts: worldwide box office for Madagascar, Chicken Little and Robots together was more than $1 billion. That means their makers can cry all the way to the piggy bank.

With reporting by Reported By Desa Philadelphia