OVP: Ernest & Celestine (2013)

Film: Ernest and Celestine (2013)

Stars: Lambert Wilson, Pauline Brunner, Dominique Maurin, and Anne-Marke Loop (I saw the French-language version)

Director: Stephane Aubier, Vincent Patar, and Benjamin Renner

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Animated Feature)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

One of the best things about the Animated Feature race at the Oscars, at least for me, has been the way that it has exposed me to a number of different films that I otherwise wouldn’t have sought out.  Like the rest of the known universe, I rejoice and head to the theaters whenever Pixar has a new movie out (at least, I did until 2010), but as a whole animation has never been something that is consistently in my oeuvre.  And yet, as I’ve learned through movies like The Wind Rises and Coraline and Monster House, some of these movies are wonderful little adventures, and well worth investigation.  After this past week, I can officially add the charming and lovely Ernest and Celestine to that list.

Based on the series of children’s books by Gabrielle Vincent, the film is about a plucky young mouse named Celestine who spends her days collecting the teeth of bears (she is training to become a dentist someday), but dreams instead of being an artist.  She is taught by her orphanage caretaker to fear bears, as they prey on mice and try to eat them.  Meanwhile, we soon learn that bears don’t specifically eat mice, but instead female bears are afraid of mice, which is where their animosity stems from.

Celestine soon comes across a bumbling, slacker of a bear named Ernest, who attempts to eat her (so the caretaker, played for comic effect as an aging grandmother who exaggerates every story, has some solid truth in her tale), but Celestine convinces him not to eat her, and instead helps him break into a candy shop (there’s a wonderfully evil side story about a husband-and-wife who are both a candy shop owner and a dentist in a devious monopoly).  Later, in order to get a leg-up on the dentist that she works for, Celestine and Ernest break into the dental shop and steal all of the teeth.  They are caught when Ernest falls asleep in the mice’ underground lair and they go on the run, and hide-out at Ernest’s cabin-in-the-woods.  Like any animated tale (French or not), they find they form an unlikely alliance, and in a scene that reeks of symbolism (it’s quite easy to see the tale as an allegory for friendship across races, classes, or genders), their respective societies come to respect their newfound buddy status.

The film’s actual plot is pretty basic, and occasionally a tad silly (the dream sequences served very little purpose and seem to be more at-home in a harsher and more serious film), but there’s little else to argue with this in this jewel-like movie.  The film actually is quite a bit funnier than you’d expect (I genuinely laughed in a very sparsely-populated theater), and the physical comedy bits are all great.

The best part of the film is the wonderful animation.  Animation styles are rarely experimented with in mainstream film, so Ernest and Celestine comes across as a bit of culture shock.  The movie isn’t polished with perfectly drawn and sketched characters, but instead recalls the drawings of Ernest H. Shepard-beautiful and stunning, even if seemingly incomplete.  It’s lush and gorgeous, and while we’ll probably get into the OVP for 2013 in May (I am aware 2009 is still unfinished…I’ll get there), I will definitely say that visually there’s no beating Ernest (and that’s against the very attractive The Croods and The Wind Rises, proving that the Academy clearly did the best they could with a bad situation for this category last year).

Those were my thoughts-what are yours?  Did you like Ernest and Celestine?  Do you wish that American animation would be a little more experimental with animated film?  And who do you think deserved the Oscar win last year for Animated Feature film?