“Loving Vincent” — How the Ignorati Killed a Masterpiece in Oil…

…and once again quashed a medium they fear.

Everyone knows Vincent van Gogh; some know only that he painted, some will know how he painted, some may know he cut off an ear (his own) and gifted it to a woman, while others might know he killed himself —

— and they’d be wrong.

We gunned down Vincent van Gogh twice, once in 1890, as cultural ignorami in the small French town of Auvers-sur-Oise, and the second time just last week, in the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, California, as the artistic ignorati of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded the Best Animated Picture Oscar to “Coco” instead of a film called “Loving Vincent”.

If you’ve seen both, you’ll understand. If you haven’t, you should; not to turn this into a grudge match, but because seen together they’ll contrast the difference between what the people who vote in The Academy want animated films to be, and what the people making animated films want them to be —

— art, fascinating, compelling, surpising, moving works of art, for both children, and those who aren’t.

Whenever animation strays into the arena of adult fare, the Academy either ignores it, or stuffs it back into the toy box, where it belongs. The…