by Nathaniel R
which movies willed this category into existence?
With just 16 days to go until Coco wins Pixar its 9th Academy Award for Best Animated Feature let's look back over the first 16 years of the category. (Yes, that's right math geniuses, Pixar has won a full 50% of the animated Oscars thus far.)
The History, Chronologically
1988-2000 The category didn't exist until 2001 but it wasn't just created on a whim. The previous dozen years which included the renaissance of Disney, the sizeable popularity influence and beauty of what was happening in Japanese animation, the explosion of new animation studios all over the map, and the rise of Pixar in particular, all led us to the inevitable: an Oscar category for animated features...
2001 Shrek took the first animated Oscar with Monsters Inc in (probably distant) second place. This seems insane now as Monsters Inc has aged so beautifully but the world went abso-bonkers for Shrek in its year and some thought it might actually snag a Best Picture nomination. Thankfully it did not. The other nominee that year was Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.
The rules haven't changed much over the years and 16 films have to be eligible to trigger a five wide and opposed to three nominee category. For the first 10 years the category jumped back and forth between 3 and 5 but now it's clear that it will be 5 nominees each year. If you think about it 16 is ludicrously low to trigger 5 nominees. You have a ridiculously high percentage chance of being nominated if you even exist! Imagine if that same percentage applied to Best Picture. We'd have like 90 Best Picture nominees a year.
2002 Spirited Away by animation legend Hayao Miyazaki becomes the first and only foreign language winner of the category (though it was also released in a dubbed version). It was the first year with five nominees which probably helped it to win with the other films, all American mainstream pictures, struggling to feel anything like distinctive with that great Miyazaki picture in their midst. The runner up was surely Disney's Lilo & Stitch and the other nominees were Ice Age, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and Treasure Planet.
2003 Finding Nemo becomes Pixar's first winner. It's funny that the category which was, in part, prompted by their elevation of the game for animated films took them three years to win! The other nominees were the semi-forgotten Brother Bear and Sylvain Chomet's delicious oddity Triplets of Belleville.
2004 The Incredibles wins and surely by a huge margin over Shrek 2 and, it pains me to type this, Shark Tale.
2005 Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, from the UK's wonderful Nick Park, wins. It's one of the very few non-American winners. Its competitors were also super: Howl's Moving Castle and Corpse Bride. This year of the category is notable for being the only year in which a a mainstream CGI picture was not nominated. We had two stop motion efforts and one hand drawn nominee.
2006 Happy Feet takes it in one of the category's most competitive years with the underappreciated Monster House and the box office smash Cars as its competition.
2007 Ratatouille wins, starting a big run of Pixar champs. The unique foreign entry Persepolis and, uh, Surf's Up were the other nominees.
2008 WALL•E, which obviously should have been nominated for Best Picture, takes the prize with Kung Fu Panda as its chief competition. Disney's Bolt was also nominated.
2009 Up, which is also nominated for Best Picture, gives the Oscar to Pixar again in what is surely one of the the finest quality years for this annual shortlist. The other nominees were Coraline, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Secret of Kells, and The Princess and the Frog.
2010 Toy Story 3 finishes Pixar's four consecutive year run as champ of the category. This was also the final year date with only 3 nominees in the category and the final animated film to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. The Illusionist and How to Train Your Dragon (the latter of which would have won in most years) were the other nominees.
2011 Rango wins! And probably by a lot with A Cat in Paris, Chico & Rita, Kung Fu Panda 2, and Puss in Boots as the other nominees. (Trivia note: This is the first year in which Pixar missed the nomination as voters turned their noses up, rightly so, to Cars 2)
2012 Brave takes the Oscar in what is, we'd argue, the single most competitive year of the category. It was something of a nail-biter with Frankenweenie, ParaNorman, Wreck-It-Ralph all enjoying strong support and Pirates! Band of Misfits also nominated.
2013 Frozen, a juggernaut, wins the Oscar in what was surely a landslide despite the sentimental pull of honoring Hayao Miyazaki's final film The Wind Rises. The other nominees were The Croods, Despicable Me 2, and the sweet delightful Ernest & Celestine.
2014 Big Hero 6 takes the Oscar for Disney in a competitive year with The Boxtrolls, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Song of the Sea, and The Tale of Princess Kaguya as nominees. No matter what you think of Big Hero 6 this year is noteworthy because you have to start questioning what Laika and Cartoon Saloon will have to do to actually win the prize. They have stupendous track records for quality and they're always nominated and yet they never win!
2015 Inside Out marks a comeback for Pixar after their first two nomination snubs (Cars 2 in 2011 and Monsters University in 2013) and wins the gold. The other nominees were Anomalisa, Boy and the World, Shaun the Sheep Movie, and When Marnie Was There.
2016 Zootopia wins in one of the highest quality years for this category. Laika's Kubo and the Two Strings put up a respectable fight for Laika, some wondering if it might prove a winning dark horse. The other nominees were Disney's musical Moana (which we'd argue only "disappointed" because expectations were too high), and two beautifully made foreign pics that reminded us yet again that animation should be a medium, not a genre, My Life as a Zucchini and The Red Turtle.
AND THAT'S THAT UNTIL MARCH 4TH. The nominees for 2017 are Boss Baby, The Breadwinner, Coco, Ferdinand, and Loving Vincent, and they're charted up right here!
Here's how I'd rank the winners (thus far). How would you rank them and do you think the category needs any rule changes?
Nathaniel's Rank of the Animated Winners
- WALL•E (Pixar)
- The Incredibles (Pixar)
- Spirited Away (Studio Ghibli)
🔺 all masterpieces up in there - Ratatouille (Pixar)
- Inside Out (Pixar)
- Frozen (Disney)
- Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Aardman)
- Toy Story 3 (Pixar)
🔺great movies all - Zootopia (Disney)
- Up (Pixar)
- Rango (Paramount)
🔺enjoyable treats - Finding Nemo (Pixar)
- Brave (Pixar)
- Happy Feet (Warner Bros)
- Big Hero 6 (Disney)
🔺good to decent - Shrek (Dreamworks)
🔺 no thank you