At the 93rd Academy Awards on Sunday soul won the Oscar for best animated feature. Against Netflix Over the moon, Aardman animation Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon, Pixars Further, and cartoon saloon’s Wolf Wanderer, soul grabbed the grand prize.
Wolf Wanderer The fans had been hoping for more, but it was still to be expected.
In the 20 years that Best Animated Feature was a category at the Academy Awards, Pixar movies have won 10 times – and in years when a Pixar movie has been in competition, they have rarely lost. There were only three cases where a non-Pixar film beat a Pixar nominee and three cases where eligible Pixar films were not nominated at all. Every time a non-Pixar film wins, there has been a year in which no Pixar film could be nominated. Academy voters are notorious for constantly disregarding the animation category, speaking in interviews about not bothering to watch all the films, and only voting for the best-known titles from the biggest companies. Even in years when worthy titles like Love Vincent, Persepolis, and The secret of the Kells were ready for the award, the profit went to Pixar.
For a large part of the passing of the category, the Academy’s animation department selected the nominees for the best animated feature. But in 2018 A new rule opened the vote via nominations to everyone who wanted to participate (this is how it works Boss baby got a nomination in 2018). This has of course shifted the category towards American films from major studios, although it’s not like smaller independent international features are going to win grand prizes anyway. But as an anonymous Oscar voter in The Hollywood Reporter
“To the [The Lego Movie] Not getting over these two obscure damn Chinese damn things that no one ever saw [an apparent reference to Studio Ghibli’s film The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, which is Japanese, and the Irish film Song of the Sea]? This is my biggest slut. Most people didn’t even know what they were! How does that happen For me this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. “
Pixar films are considered some of the best that American animation has to offer. They are beautifully animated and contain heartfelt emotional moments connecting storylines that often end with unexpected bittersweet. But while Pixar films are very good, there are films that are nominated for the animation category that never really get a chance as the default seems to be American studios with big budget. While Pixar has had a firm grip on the category since its inception, there have been a few instances where other films have managed to grab the award. Let’s take a look back at the six times Pixar films lost at the Oscars.
2001: someone told me once
2001 was the first year films were included in this category, which means no Disney Renaissance film has ever been named Best Animated Feature. (Although 1991 Beauty and the Beast was nominated for best picture.) In the award’s inaugural year, three films were nominated: Pixar’s Monster Inc., Nickelodeon Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, and DreamWorks’ Shrek. It was Shrek that took the gold home – and changed the landscape of American animation, but that’s a story for another time.
It’s strange at this point to think about how a movie that spawned a million memes and was made as a big fuck-you for Disney won its first Oscar for Best Animated Image. But nervous, cynical Shrek
2006: The fault in our cars
No Pixar movie was released in 2002, and the award for that year went to Spiritually gone. Find Nemo and The unbelievable brought the Pixar magic in 2003 and 2004 and won the grand prize, cars failed in 2006. Instead, Mad Max director George Miller won this year’s award with the penguin dance comedy Happy feet. The other contender for that year was Columbia Pictures’ child-focused horror film Monster house.
No Pixar film was released in 2005 either – and incidentally, 2002 and 2005 were the only two years in the entire history of the award that non-American films have won. However, it should be noted that both Spiritually gone and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Wer-Rabbit had some affiliations with Hollywood studios, the former being distributed by Disney and the latter being produced by DreamWorks.
How Sam Adams wrote for SlateWith these two exceptions aside, it’s like “the Oscar for Best Animated Film was essentially passed from one Hollywood studio to the next without the four consecutive years it spent in Pixar’s front lobby.”
2011, 2013, 2016: The Lost Sequels
Pixar dominated the category for years carsand won for 2007 Ratatouille, 2008 WALL-E, 2009 Above, 2010s Toy Story 3and 2012 Brave... When Cars 2 In 2011, it was the first year that a qualifying Pixar film wasn’t even nominated for best animated feature. A pattern also started when Pixar repeatedly lost in the category with sequels that did not match the grandeur of the originals. (The Toy story Sequels are a big exception, as always.) 2011’s Cars 2, 2013 Monster Universityand 2016 Find Dory Everyone missed the nomination – the winners of those years were Paramount Pictures’ rank and Disney’s Frozen and Zootopia. At the time, Disney owned Pixar – and even when Pixar lost, the award still went to Disney twice in three. That’s what I call corporate synergy!
There were two other Pixar films that weren’t nominated (2015s) The good dinosaur and 2017 Cars 3) but they came out in years when another Pixar movie (Coco and from the inside to the outside, respectively) did Instead, grab the nomination and win.
2018: A new breed of superhero
2018 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Shattered expectations not only of what an animated film could be, but what a superhero film could be. It embraced the medium of animation and shed photorealism for a non-excusing stylization. It’s a love letter to cartoons and comics.
It’s kind of funny that the Pixar movie he was up against was Incredible 2, a superhero film that was a pretty solid sequel in every way. But it was difficult to follow, and given Spider verseit was surpassed and surpassed.
In 2020 even with the Netflix Distributed Klaus and I lost my body show up to challenge the reigning champion,Toy Story 4 took home the grand prize. With soul If Pixar takes home the trophy this time around, it would appear that Pixar’s revitalized focus on original movies will bring benefits as it comes out of the sequel slump the company got into in the early 2010s. Pixar is back to dominate the category with its original films (except for Cars, but we won’t talk about that) it never really went away.
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