This year’s race for the Best Animated Feature Oscar changes everything

Out of all the categories at the Academy Awards, Best Animated Feature has historically been one of the most predictable.

For nearly 20 years, it was basically a guarantee that if a Pixar movie was up for the award, it would win. However, over the past five years, that dynamic has shifted, with an increasing number of international and visually distinct competitors entering the category — and nothing exemplifies that more than this year’s nominees.

Prior to 2020, there were only three instances where a non-Pixar film beat a nominated Pixar movie. Since 2020, a Pixar movie has been nominated every year, but only one of them, Soul, won Best Animated Feature. And the nominees themselves have covered a much broader spectrum of styles and subject matter than the usual smattering of popular children’s movies.

This year’s nominees in the category are some of the most eclectic yet. In addition to Pixar’s Inside Out 2, there’s DreamWorks’ evocative and painterly The Wild Robot; Aardman Animations and Netflix’s new Wallace & Gromit movie; Flow, the wordless Latvian post-apocalyptic cat adventure that snagged the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature; and the Australian stop-motion film Memoir of a Snail, a semi-autobiographical deep dive into one woman’s traumatic childhood.

The range of nominees this year — in form, tone, and execution — could be a sign that slowly but surely, American audiences are taking animation more seriously as a medium. And by extension, the Academy is too.

This animation reckoning has been a long time coming

Since the Best Animated Feature category was introduced in 2001, the nominees have mostly been popular kids’ movies from big American studios. Occasionally, an international entry like Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away would edge its way in, or a more serious film like the 2021 documentary Flee would get a nod.

But overwhelmingly, it seemed like the Academy considered Best Animated Feature the “kids’ movie” category. Anonymous AMPAS voters complaining about the lesser-known films on the ballot underlined that impression, and so did the ceremony itself dismissing the category with jokes about how the nominated movies were annoying parents by being replayed over and over.

Animators have pushed back. Pinocchio director Guillermo del Toro openly spoke about his disdain for mainstream animation relying too much on quips and “emotional pornography” — a hallmark of the kids’ movies that AMPAS seemed to associate with the medium. After the 95th Academy Awards ceremony, directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller penned an op-ed decrying the ceremony’s derisive treatment of the category, and urging Hollywood to take the medium more seriously.

Meanwhile, international animation has finally been getting its due with American audiences. The most obvious example is anime, which many in the industry say has shifted the tide for audience expectations of animation. Academy voters don’t necessarily care about audience expectations (sometimes notoriously so — remember the Popular Movie category fiasco?), but with this category in particular, voters have usually followed what’s popular. They often nominate commercially successful American movies like 2017’s The Boss Baby over smaller, more deserving films like The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl and A Silent Voice, which debuted the same year. So when it comes to this category, a change in mainstream audience preferences actually could affect voting.

We can’t discount the Spider-Verse effect

In 2018, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse changed everything for American animation. The movie’s success not only opened animators’ eyes to the possibilities of CG animation, but also (and arguably, more importantly) proved to studio executives that letting animators play with style could pay off.

Once, everyone was chasing the same photorealism that Pixar perfected. Now, even at big studios like DreamWorks, animators are carving out their own distinctive visual styles. This might have the double effect of adding appeal to animated movies that once appeared a little too weird for traditional Academy voters to take a chance, while also making Disney and Pixar’s house style look dated and mundane by comparison.

At the same time, Pixar is facing its own internal problems. Pixar was once the forefront of original and boundary-pushing stories in American animation, but Disney executives have pushed the studio to focus on existing IP and sequels. And while those existing IPs certainly generate millions of dollars, they’re rarely groundbreaking — or the kind of creative exemplars the Academy is supposedly out to honor.

2025’s awards don’t mark the first time the Academy has nominated multiple smaller, independent animated movies over big blockbusters. One or two imports like The Triplets of Belleville, Persepolis, or The Secret of Kells often squeeze into the category, amid the homogenous family-friendly fare from American studios. In the past five years, though, the category hasn’t looked as stylistically similar as before — for instance, last year pitted Pixar’s more traditional Elemental against the cartoony Robot Dreams, Studio Ghibli’s lush The Boy and the Heron, Nimona’s 2D-inspired 3D look, and Across the Spider-Verse’s (literal) rule-breaking mishmash of styles.

This year continues that trend — and it’s particularly notable, because in addition to each of the movies being visually distinct, two of them are small, independent foreign films. With more traditional American blockbusters like Moana 2, Kung Fu Panda 4, and Despicable Me 4 all eligible in the category, it’s a wonderful and welcome surprise that save for Inside Out 2, the rest of the category is multifaceted this year.

DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot has the big studio pedigree, but the art style is gorgeous and impressionistic, a far cry from how DreamWorks movies used to look. Netflix and Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is a delightful, impressive slapstick stop-motion fest. Memoir of a Snail tackles some really heavy subject matter, using animation to nail the right blend of whimsy and gravitas. Flow is entirely without dialogue, but its impressive animal movement conveys so much feeling without any words.

Regardless of which movie takes home that Oscar gold, the fact that the category is so robust this year is already signaling a huge change. The momentum of the past five years has built up. In 2025, it might finally crest over and completely usher in a new wave of how the American public views animation.