Animation and the Academy: The Case for Best Picture
Published October 31st, 2024 University of Iowa's Bijou Blog

“Animation is not a genre for kids. It's a medium for art, it's a medium for film, and I think animation should stay in the conversation.” – Guillermo del Toro, 2023

 

When I was a kid, I used to throw tantrums when my older sisters or parents would choose a “real” movie for family movie night, instead of an animated one. I didn’t know the word “live-action” at the time, although it ultimately wouldn’t have made much of a difference in the inevitable protest I would often mount. My younger brother and I would riot at the outrageous proposal of sitting through a non-animated film for 90 minutes instead of watching the same four Pixar movies over and over again. 

 

This distinction between “animated” and “real” movies is one I eventually outgrew. But over the last few years, it’s become more and more obvious that I can’t say the same for the Academy voters.

 

It was just a few years ago, during the height of my Oscars-history obsession, that I learned only three animated films have ever been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Beauty and the Beast (1991) made history as the first in 1992 (nine years before the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature would be introduced), but it would be nineteen years before we saw another. Pixar’s Up (2009) and Toy Story 3 (2010) were nominated in the two years following the Academy’s expansion of Best Picture nomination slots (from 5 to 10). 

 

Despite the hundreds of eligible films produced, the last 14 years have seen a total shut-out of animated films in the category. What initially felt like a fun piece of Oscars trivia quickly became something incredibly frustrating: in nearly a century of Academy Awards, animation has been considered for its highest honor only three times.

 

That realization came back into focus in January of this year, when the 96th Academy Award nominations were announced.

During awards season, those of us foolish enough to be invested tend to sort the year’s film slate into unofficial tiers. There are the movies we root against, the ones we love and cheer on in their predictable (and often deserved!) wins, the films that we feel remarkably indifferent toward, and, best of all, the ones that we know have no shot and hold out hope for anyway. 

 

Of my list of hopeful upsets for last year’s Oscars, my most unpopular and improbable hope was one that would’ve made history–a Best Picture nomination for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023). 

 

If it had happened, it would have marked several firsts at once: the first non-Disney/Pixar animated film in the category, the first animated film centered on a Black lead, and the first post-2010 animated feature to break through.

 

Instead, the film lost Best Animated Feature to Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron (2023), and was shut out of other categories entirely—including Visual Effects, which felt especially difficult to justify, and Original Score. Its absence from broader recognition raised a familiar question: is animation still structurally excluded from “serious” awards consideration?

 

I do not bring up Spider-Verse as a singular injustice that proves a simple point. It is not an outlier so much as a convenient example in a longer pattern. It’s a losing battle to pick fights over specific animated masterpieces (of which there are many, and the vast majority of which have been ignored). I can acknowledge that even without its loss to The Boy and the Heron, Spider-Verse’s chances were still incredibly slim, especially considering that it is a comic-book-based superhero movie–a genre consistently spurned by The Academy. 

 

What I hope this example brings to mind is that there is a trend of animated films being excluded from key categories, even when they are transformational and beloved works of art. 

 

My problems with The Academy in this regard do not begin or end with Spider-Verse’s fate, just as they don’t rest solely on any one film’s omission. I could include case studies of animated films’ snubs (for example, no Studio Ghibli film has been nominated for a category beyond Best Animated Feature), but my point really lies in the statistics.

 

In 96 years, animated films have received:

• 3 Best Picture nominations

• 7 Original Screenplay nominations (all for Pixar films*)

• 3 Visual Effects nominations**

In none of these categories has an animated film ever won. 

 

2028 will mark the 100th year of the Academy Awards. We can only hope that, by then, the Academy will shake its strict distinction between animation and “real” cinema that I grew out of before I could spell “movie.”

 

Yes, I doubt any Academy members are reading this piece. No, I don’t think I’m about to solve the problem. If for nothing else, I hope to have inspired just one person to include an animated film in their long-shot list of Oscar nomination hopes. My pick? The Wild Robot (2024), in theaters now. 

 

At this point, I am less interested in predicting outcomes than in widening the list of films people even consider possible contenders. We will see what awards season brings.

 

* For those interested: Toy Story (1995), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Ratatouille (2007), WALL-E (2008), Up (2009), and Inside Out (2015). Next year could mark a decade since the last nomination (and the 97th without a win)!

 

**The Visual Effects nominations were for two stop-motion films (Nightmare Before Christmas and Kubo and the Two Strings) and my absolute enemy, CGI “animation” nightmare The Lion King (2019)