Dracula's Best Animated Feature Gauntlet

The fact that they brag that it's "the ninth highest-grossing movie of 2004" is a bit suspicious.

It means they did slightly better than Ocean's Twelve and quite a bit worse than Troy.

The fact that they managed to get I. Robot to number 11 is, if nothing else, a testament to Will Smith's immense popularity at the box office because that damn thing should have straight up bombed.  

Despicable Me 2 (2013)

Despicable Me 2 is a film with the unique distinction of being the only sequel to ever be nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar when its original had failed to be nominated (that’s excluding examples like Toy Story 3, where its predecessors predate the existence of the category). That means that to prepare for this review I needed to watch the original Despicable Me on my own time, much to the confusion of my Letterboxd followers when I logged it in the September of 2020. Anyway, I’d like to go into some detail about why that movie sucked but the truth of the matter is it wasn’t bad in a terribly interesting or memorable way. In fact, I barely remember it. On my original logging I called it “in one ear and out the other cinema” and boy oh boy was that true. I would have preferred if the rest of the world had forgotten about it as well but instead it made a bunch of money and seems to have remained popular with kids. The thing is, the kids didn’t seem to give a shit about the main character Gru or any of the shit about him adopting three orphans as part of some stupid scheme, all they seemed to care about were these side characters called the Minions. I don’t think I need to explain what these round yellow fuckers are, if you’ve been alive in the last decade you’ve probably had plenty of them shoved down your throat in advertisements and whatnot. I don’t really get the appeal of them and find them and pretty much everything else in this series kind of annoying.

That this sequel got nominated while its predecessor didn’t should not be viewed as an indicator of improvement. There were only three nominees in 2010 when the first movie was eligible while there were five nominees in 2013 when this one was up. Beyond that I can only assume that this got a rosier reception out of its association with the Pharrell Williams song “Happy,” though that song didn’t really take off until it was nominated either so that theory is questionable too. Anyway, this would be yet another sequel that kind of has to grasp at straws to find a new conflict for its main character after having pretty adequately closed out their arc in the first movie. This seems very interested in having their reformed former Bond villain pastiche main character find a wife for some reason and in typical Parent Trap fashion his adopted daughters seem oddly obsessed with this and interested in meddling in his love life. I must say this is a trope I’ve never understood even a little. I didn’t grow up with a single parent but I think I can say with a degree of certainty that if I did the last thing in the world I would have ever wanted to think about is hooking them up with someone. Aside from that shitty nonsensical love story this just has an action plot where he goes up against some sort of weird Latino stereotype villain who’s evil with seemingly no motive. The animation is decent and there are a couple of visual gags here and there that are at least somewhat visually inventive, but I doubt it will leave much more of an impression on me than the first one did.
*1/2 out of Five

In Conclusion
Well, I finished it, so what have I learned? Probably nothing. Well, I guess what I learned is that I mostly have good instincts about what to avoid because there were very few surprises here. I thought I’d maybe discover a couple of diamonds in the rough, but aside from some movies like Surf’s Up and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron being a little better than I expected I would say most of these were movies I would have been find to have kept on skipping. That’s not to say I regret the undertaking. There’s always a degree of satisfaction in accomplishing something you set out to do in and of itself and there were quite a few movies here like The Boss Baby and Shark Tale that I’m happy to be able to trash with more credibility going forward. And also there are some inherent bragging rights to be had for having seen every Best Animated Feature… I mean, the number of people who would actually be impressed by the brag is kind of small but I’m still going to see it as a moral victory.

Dracula watching Puss in Boots: The Last Wish get good reviews and likely be nominated for Best Animated Feature

I was gonna say it might since the box-office seems a bit middling but in fact it's pretty much already passed its budget so maybe it's doing better than I thought.

Not only did Puss n Boots make it to #9 on Letterboxd, but Marcel the Shell is #3. Horrible year for Dracula.

letterboxd.com/2022/#highest-rated-overall

I dropped $5.99 for a digital rental of it last week on Prime Video.  Surely you can spare $5.99?