Intro for November 8, 2024

Dear Gossips,

It’s time again for the semi-annual conversation about whether or not an animated film will be taken seriously as a Best Picture contender. The short answer: no. The longer answer: still no, because of deep-seated genre bias and a tendency to see animated films as “kid stuff”. The question arises in article in Variety by Clayton Davis, in which he argues on behalf of the narrative scope and creative boundary pushing found in the animation genre. 

This year has been a great year for animation, with mainstream hits like Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot and smaller films like Memoirs of a Snail combining top notch artistry with great storytelling. Plus Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is one of the highest rated films of the year (so far). If ever there was a year for an animated film to break out of the Best Animated Feature ghetto and land, say, a screenplay nomination, or perhaps a visual effects nod for stop motion animation such as Wallace & Gromit, or maybe even a Best Picture nomination, it’s this year, with so many excellent animated films to choose from.

But it won’t happen, sorry. That doesn’t make it right or fair—it is explicitly neither!—but every few years this conversation comes up, and it always goes the same way. The Academy is so bad at taking animated films seriously, a category had to be created specifically to recognize achievement in long form animation. They have occasionally recognized animated films, Beauty and the Beast was the first animated film nominated for Best Picture in 1992, and in 1939 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs earned an honorary Oscar. In the modern era, though, another animated film wasn’t nominated for Best Picture until 2010, when Up received a nomination. Not for nothing, that year the Best Picture field expanded to ten.

And sometimes an animated film gets other nominations, too. Up was also nominated for its screenplay, score, and sound editing. The Nightmare Before Christmas and Kubo and the Two Strings were both nominated for their visual effects. This year, Pixar and DreamWorks are hoping Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot can earn screenplay nominations (they’re both eligible for adapted screenplay), which isn’t totally out of bounds for ONE of them, but I highly doubt both get nominated. Asking the Academy to take TWO animated films seriously beyond the animation category is asking too much. 

An unnamed awards strategist tells Davis: “I’ve worked on many animated campaigns, and it’s always hard to get them seen. […] They’ll usually watch the big Disney movie, but anything beyond that gets difficult.”

There’s a reason I call the Best Animated Feature Oscar “Pixar’s Annual Oscar” and it’s not because I’m a diehard Pixar fan. It’s because they’re so closely associated with high quality animation, that award is almost always a shoo-in for them. This year, they have some stiff competition from The Wild Robot—which, thanks to its eye-popping artistry, has a long shot at a Best Picture nomination, but if the Spider-Verse movies couldn’t do it…

Well, I’m not holding my breath. Clayton Davis is right, it WOULD be nice if animation got more respect from the Academy, if animated films would be considered as worthy as live action for Best Picture nominations. But no matter how rich the themes are or beautifully told the story is, too many people automatically assume animation is the realm of children, even when the film is explicitly NOT for kids, like I Lost My Body. 2024 has been a great year for animated cinema, but it’s probably not enough to overcome the Academy’s genre bias. If the Academy got over themselves and embraced genres beyond drama, the Oscars would be a lot more interesting.

Live long and gossip,

Sarah