Sprightly animation about a student’s attempt to stop the destruction of a woodland leans into Disney’s love of anthropomorphism and riffs amusingly on Avatar

Writer-director Daniel Chong brings us a witty, sprightly family animation, co-produced by Pixar veteran Pete Docter and co-written by Jesse Andrews, who may conceivably have supplied quite a bit of the punching-up and the funny incidental lines. In its modest, insouciant way, it is about protecting the environment, and riffs amusingly on films such as Avatar (there’s some amusing preemptive material about it not being like Avatar, but it is, especially at the end) as well as Inception, The Lion King and Dr Dolittle. It’s also about Disney anthropomorphism generally: the great mystery of what it must be like to be an animal and the human yearning to communicate and empathise with them.

Mabel, voiced by Piper Curda, is a teenager who lives with her grandma (the absence of her mom is slightly skated over) and learns from this wise older person the importance of loving nature, particularly the peaceful woodland glade near their house – and the associated importance of acceptance and forgiveness for people that you maybe don’t get along with. But when the evil Mayor Jerry (voiced by Jon Hamm) says he intends to destroy this glade to make way for a freeway, Mabel realises that the only way to stop him legally is to repopulate the glade with the beavers and other animals who have mysteriously vanished.

Kicking off this year’s series in which our writers advocate for one Academy Award nominee, our chief critic on why the Brazilian drama-thriller is the most audacious and fully realised film in the race

As ever, this year’s Oscars have their half-dozen or so favourites and frontrunners, some truly outstanding movies among them. But the one that has stayed in my mind is a knight’s move away from the talking-point consensus: an amazingly sophisticated, wayward and garrulous film from Brazil, a film about love and fatherhood, tyranny and resistance, and coming to terms with the past. It is digressive and droll and yet in its final act escalates stunningly from lugubrious mystery to cold-sweat tension and violence.

When the best picture Oscar is announced, my heart would sing to see its husband-and-wife producers Emilie Lesclaux and Kleber Mendonça Filho go on stage to accept it for their drama-thriller The Secret Agent. Directed by Mendonça Filho, it’s a movie made with effortless style and touched with pure cinematic inspiration. The opening scene alone, with its queasy black-comic unease, is itself a kind of masterpiece. It is like Antonioni’s The Passenger mixed with Leone and Peckinpah and a pulp shocker by Elmore Leonard. Yet it has a kind of novelistic, episodic quality – a cool, discursive self-awareness. You might call it a little miracle, although at near-epic length (2hrs 40mins), it’s actually a very big miracle.