It opened on Friday but didn’t wind up on any weekend boxoffice charts.
It wasn’t reviewed in the L.A. Times, the paper of record in the town where it’s playing.
It doesn’t have an MPAA rating.
It doesn’t have a scheduled U.S. release date, beyond this one-week engagement.
It’s not drawing many viewers, judging by the Saturday night show, in which the audience consisted of me and one other guy.
It’s a kid-friendly movie, but it only screens once daily: 1 p.m. on school days, 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. (A Sunday afternoon showing was the single convenient screening for school-age moviegoers.)
If any kids do happen to see it, they’ll probably have trouble getting into the ecologically-minded tale of animals being hunted down for mysterious reasons; it’s in Spanish, and its subtitles are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors.
And it’s not even advertised on the marquee of the Laemmle Town Center in Encino, the one theater in which it’s playing. (Photo, right)
But in the world of animation, “The Missing Lynx: Paws on the Run” could prove to be one of the year’s most significant releases.
The director of the Spanish movie, Raul Garcia, confirmed to theWrap on Saturday that the company had submitted the paperwork required to enter the film in the Oscar animated-feature race.
The news is crucial because for the last couple of weeks, the number of entries in the category appeared to have stalled at 15. If 15 movies qualify, the category will have three nominees; if 16 do so, it’ll jump to five.
With a number of high-profile, well-reviewed films in the running, and with “Up” and “Coraline” seemingly heavy favorites for the first two slots, a slate of three nominees would have resulted in a dogfight for the final spot between the likes of “Ponyo,” Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog,” the buzzed-about “Mary and Max,” Sony’s “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” Wes Anderson’s “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “9,” and the boxoffice hit “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs,” among others.
It’s been a waiting game within the animation community in recent weeks, as a slate of eligible films that once seemed likely to top 16 dwindled. The Japanese film “Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone” was disqualified, “The Illusionist” opted for a 2010 release, and “A Town Called Panic” played in New York but not Los Angeles. (To qualify, a film needs seven days in L.A. County.)
Some observers wondered if Fox and Sony, two companies that stand to gain by reaching the magic 16 figure, would quietly push to make sure something else got a quickie qualifying run and filled out the paperwork.
(Disney already did its part by giving “Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure” a one-week qualifying run at the El Capitan and submitting it to the Academy before sending it to DVD.)
But now, with the deadline for Oscar submissions arriving at 5 p.m. on Monday, we may have an unlikely savior in the form of “The Missing Lynx,” a Spanish film that was released in that country in December 2008, winning the Goya Award for best animated feature.
