A look at the Oscar-nominated animated features

This year’s Oscar-nominated animated features are all fairly kid-friendly — though the fact that your family can watch these movies together won’t necessarily mean the whole family will want to.

“This is a great movie,” deadpanned my most sarcastic child about 20-ish minutes into Arco (rent or purchase), a French animated movie that in its English dub features the voices of Mark Ruffalo, Natalie Portman, Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, Flea, America Ferrera and more. Arco is a boy living about 1,000 years in the future and eager to go back in time, as his parents and older sister frequently do, to see dinosaurs. He steals a time-traveling flying suit and zooms off, only to land in the 2070s in a world of robot nannies and suburban homes existing in bubbles meant to protect them from rainstorms and wildfires. Arco is found by Iris, a girl around his age, and the two work on trying to get him back to his time, while dodging a trio of goofballs who have stumbled on the diamond Arco needs to power his suit. While I don’t exactly agree with my kids — the bored one who stayed to complain about the movie, the even more bored one who lasted about five minutes during the most action-packed sequence before deeming it too boring — Arco does have a chilliness and a calm that counteracts the adventure of its premise. It is, however, lovely to look at and there is real emotion behind the relationships, including between Iris and Mikki, her robot nanny.

Their relationship is very similar to one between the main character and her caregiver in Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (rent or purchase). As a baby, Amélie is decreed a “vegetable” by her doctor, but when she’s about 2 years old, an earthquake and a few squares of white chocolate wake her up to the world — specifically, her world in mid-20th-century Japan where her Belgian diplomat father and concert pianist mother are living with Amélie’s two older siblings. When the kind and thoughtful Nishio-san comes to work for the family, Amélie bonds with her, learning how to be in the world and to process experiences of grief and joy. Their relationship is very sweet and the movie is rendered in a kind of picture-book brightness that I enjoyed but could be too gentle for kids looking for, say, demons and sword fights.

KPop Demon Hunters (Netflix) on the other hand delivers when it comes to action and was a movie that I think my kids watched on repeat for about a month after its June release. The trio Huntrix is a hugely popular KPop girl band who are also secret demon fighters, the latest in a long line of fighters throughout history whose voices create a protective shield between our world and the demon world and who have the ability to spot and battle any demons that sneak through. With its pop music soundtrack (including original song nominee “Golden”) that to me sounds like the music you hear at a workout class and its stretches of tinny earnestness, this one is very much not for me, though I do appreciate the elements of the movie reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“into every generation,” etc.) and Jem and the Holograms (secret identities and a “totally outrageous” stage presence). And the movie has its moments of goofy fun, particularly as Huntrix is faced with battling demons taking the form of a floppy-haired boy band.

My kids enjoyed KPop Demon Hunters and they liked, well enough, Zootopia 2(rent or purchase), a movie whose most “adults friendly” quality is that I, the parent, could let myself snooze through the movie knowing my kids would be reasonably entertained and kept in a Disney safe space. As with its previous outing, Zootopia 2 features a fox (Nick Wilde, voiced by Jason Bateman) and bunny (Judy Hopps, voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) working together to fight injustice. This time both Judy, the cop trying to prove herself, and Nick, a former guy on the make, are police officers. They attempt to overcome big-animal privilege and prove their own abilities in the investigation of some sneaky goings on that may have links to the founding of Zootopia and the longtime mammal/reptile divide. As with the first movie, it is jarring when the movie attempts to map people-world racism and classism onto animals. There are several instances of “wait, what?” with the whole Movie Saying Something vibe here. But it also features lots of quick moments of animal goofiness, usually involving one of the mile-long list of big-name voice actors — Idris Elba again, Andy Samberg, Ke Huy Quan, Patrick Warburton, Quinta Brunson, to barely name a few.

But the winner of this year’s nominees in terms of “won’t hurt the parents, won’t bore the kids” is, in my opinion, Elio (Disney+, rent or purchase). (Winner for me but probably not for Oscar. Gold Derby and my kids agree that, as one kid said “oh, KPop Demon Hunter is going to win, 100 percent.”) Released to absolute “meh” reactions in June, Eliois a Pixar movie, and while not one of Pixar’s best it is a solid tale of a kid trying to find his place in the world. Or really, in the universe, as Elio (voice of Yonas Kibreab), a boy who longs to be abducted by aliens, feels he doesn’t fit in to this world, especially after the death of his parents. He fears his aunt Olga (voice of Zoe Saldaña), an Air Force officer, resents having to care for him as it means she’s had to give up on entering the astronaut program. However, her position at an Air Force base does mean he’s nearby when they receive what seems to be a message from deep space. Elio manages to send a message back to the aliens, lending them to think he is the leader of Earth. He is whisked to space and finds himself involved in interplanetary politics — and, for the first time in a long time, making a friend. Where the movie really gets me is in its use of sound clips of Carl Sagan, which bring a hopefulness to this sweet tale that still manages to pack in lots of alien capers and physical comedy laughs.

Featured photo: Little Amélie or the Character of Rain