Academy Award for Best Animated Feature
The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature is one of the annual awards given by the Los Angeles-based professional organization, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Academy Awards, or Oscars, which are the oldest awards given to achievements in film, included the Best Animated Feature category for the first time for the 2001 film year. Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Up (2009) are the only animated films ever to be nominated for Best Picture, while Waltz with Bashir (2008) is the only animated picture ever nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.
The award is only given if there are at least eight animated feature films (with a theatrical release in Los Angeles). For the purposes of the award, only films over 70 minutes long are considered to be feature films. If there are 16 or more films submitted for the category, the winner is voted from a shortlist of five films (which has thus far happened only in 2002 and 2009), otherwise there will only be three films on the shortlist.[1]
People in the animation industry and fans expressed hope that the prestige from this award and the resulting boost to the box office would encourage the increased production of animated features. Some members and fans have criticized the award, however, saying it is only intended to prevent animated films from having a chance of winning Best Picture. This criticism was particularly prominent at the 81st Academy Awards, in which WALL-E won the award but was not nominated for Best Picture, despite receiving overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics and moviegoers and being generally considered one of the best films of 2008.[2] This led to controversy over whether the film was deliberately snubbed of the nomination by the Academy. Film critic Peter Travers commented that "If there was ever a time where an animated feature deserved to be nominated for Best Picture, it's WALL-E". However, official Academy Award regulations state that any movie nominated for this category can still be nominated for Best Picture.[1]
Computer animated films have been the big winner in this category, with six wins in the eight year history of the award. The only exceptions were in 2002 and 2005, with winners Spirited Away, a traditionally-animated anime film, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a stop-motion animation film.
Pixar Animation Studios has been the most successful organization in the history of Best Animated Feature; out of the six feature films made by Pixar between 2001 and 2008, all have been nominated and four (Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille and WALL-E) have won.
Since the Academy introduced this award category, the Golden Globes and BAFTA Awards followed the example and present a similar award.
Results
The following table displays the nominees alphabetically and the winners in bold print with a blue background.
Notes
- ^ a b Academy Awards Rules for Best Animated Feature, Retrieved January 22, 2009
- ^ "The 2008 Top Tens". Retrieved 2009-05-27.
See also
- List of animated feature-length films
- Annie Award for Best Animated Feature
- BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film
- Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film
- Japan Academy Prize for Animation of the Year
