The Best Animated Feature Battle Is Heating Up - Awards Outlook
Photo from Oscars.org
Looking At The Best Animated Feature Category
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was recently released to audience and critical acclaim and with the first movie of the series winning the Animated Feature Oscar it almost seems like this film is a lock to win Best Animated Feature. However, it will have some formidable foes to take on in order to win the coveted animated prize.
At this point, it is difficult to imagine any animated film winning over Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse as everyone has adored it and it comes from a history of winning the award with the previous film winning. However, the fact that it is an obvious first part could turn off some voters and could cause others to treat it like Dune or Lord of the Rings and save the love for the final film. Into the Spider-Verse was also beloved when it came out but it was considered an underdog in the Best Animated Oscar race and its lack of expectation and buzz did end up helping it win as it got hot at the right time.
There is only one other stand out animation film that has been released thus far and that was The Super Mario Bros Movie which was given much less critical enthusiasm but an insane level of audience satisfaction. A film that does this good in theaters does not necessarily mean Oscar but if kids loved a movie the most that could cause many different voters with kids to give this the vote. However, while Illumination is a popular animation studio, it has not received a single nomination for this category.
Elemental is this year’s Pixar film which used to mean an automatic bid into the Animated film nomination slate and almost always a win, but lately Pixar has not been as automatic and has been sub par in both quality and reception. This latest film looks like it is a step up in the visual department but did get a fairly mixed to poor reaction at Cannes, which may not have been the audience for that film.
The latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie will be coming out later in the summer and the trailers showcase an inventive style of animation which is something that is frequently honored in the category even if Nickelodeon studios does not frequent the category with only two nominations, however one of them being a win for Rango.
Lately, Disney Animation Studios has been more dominating more than Pixar with Encanto being the most recent winner and therefore this year’s film Wish seems like a solid standout with a trailer that also contained inventive animation and in addition an Original Song nomination could also occur that will at least put the film in that category causing momentum to build for the film.
The first Chicken Run movie came out the year before the Animation category existed but would have definitely been nominated as the Academy has absolutely loved the claymation style of animation which is most evident through the win for Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and therefore Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is a very likely nomination not just for the style of animation but it’s home being on Netflix could also lead to solid campaign. There could be many different Netflix animated properties flying under the radar currently that could jump to the front of the line out of nowhere.
One of the most hyped and also most mysterious animated movies from this year is Hayao Miyazaki’s returning and possibly final animated film, How Do You Live? He has been nominated three times and deservedly won for the masterpiece Spirited Away when the category was quite young. He is considered a master of animation and could easily see a nomination or a win and is definitely the greatest threat to Spider-Man. What should be interesting is that it was recently announced that there will be no promotional materials for this film to keep the mystery alive. This is an awesome yet wildly risky idea and could easily get in the way of the awards campaign and how that could look at all.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is easily the front runner for Best Animated feature at this time, but there are plenty of contenders that Miles Morales will have to fight in order to come out on top by the end. Regardless, it seems like there will be some excellent animated properties this year so in the end we will all be winners.