Oscars Best Animated Feature breakdown: Why ‘The Wild Robot’ will hold off ‘Flow,’ ‘Inside Out 2’
This year’s Academy Awards will mark the 23rd year there’s been a category for Best Animated Feature. The past winners have included a good mix of top earners (the first award went to Shrek!) and some more, shall we say, sophisticated choices. Indeed, last year, the prize went to Hayao Miyazaki, the grand master of Japanese animation, for The Boy and the Heron. Before that, Hollywood’s favorite kid-in-a-toy-store Guillermo del Toro won for his adaptation of Pinocchio. This year’s animation Academy Award is not as easy to predict as some other categories, but we’ve gone to the drawing board, and this is what we’ve sketched out.
Frontrunner: The Wild Robot
There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that The Wild Robot will be the one to take home the prize. For starters, have you seen it? It’s pretty damn cute. Lupita Nyong’o voices a goals-focused and comically literal robot — a little bit of a spin on Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation — who winds up on an island overrun by animals. A baby runt gosling accidentally imprints on her, and thus, she is tasked with teaching him to fly (while he teaches her to love!) Along the way, there’s a fox voiced by Pedro Pascal, an opossum voiced by Catherine O’Hara, and a bear voiced by Mark Hamill.
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Based on a series of successful books, the movie has tremendous kid appeal, never ignoring that while nature is beautiful, it is red in tooth and claw. Adults connect to it because it digs into the joys and heartbreak of parental responsibility. The animation is also adorable — the British beaver voiced by Matt Berry (but looking a bit like Timothy Spall) is a nice touch.
The international box office for The Wild Robot was $325 million, which is sterling for something that isn’t Pixar or based on a household-name IP. Writer-director Chris Sanders is also a four-time nominee in the category, and he’s been working in animation for 40 years, beginning as a model designer way back when on Muppet Babies. Early in his career, he worked in the story department on such Disney Renaissance pictures as Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Mulan. Sanders is credited as co-creator of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, two resonant franchises. Also, The Croods was a scream. This is a prime example of a guy everyone in the industry knows who is overdue.
With additional nominations for sound and score, the film has support in multiple branches of the Academy, which strengthens its overall Oscar chances in this category. Furthermore, The Wild Robot led all films at the Annie Awards with nine wins, including feature, and won the animated feature prize at both the PGA Awards, Critics Choice Awards, and Saturn Awards. It will also compete for the animated feature award at next weekend’s BAFTAs. It has a 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a strong 85 on Metacritic, too.
Believe it or not, DreamWorks Animation has only won this award twice (the original Shrek and then Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a co-production with Aardman), despite the studio’s tremendous box-office success (in addition to the Shrek and How to Train Your Dragon franchises, there’s Kung Fu Panda and The Boss Baby). A “spread the wealth” vibe may also help its chances.
Potential Spoiler: Flow
If anything could shut down The Wild Robot, it’s the unlikely low-budget upstart Flow from (checks notes) Latvia. Director Gints Zimbalodis hatched this wordless animated film on free software called Blender. Also, he created the score despite not knowing how to play instruments or read music. Yet the film, which already won the Golden Globe in this category, is immediately enveloping. It follows a cat overcoming one obstacle after another during a flood — eventually learning to trust fellow animals who are (literally) in the same boat.
The sudden camaraderie of normally distrusting characters set against a vague environmentalist background is quite similar to the plot of The Wild Robot. Whereas that one has many verbal gags, Flow depends entirely on visual storytelling and elaborate “one-take” images. The aggregated critic ratings of the two films are almost identical, too, with Flow at 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 86 on Metacritic.
Like The Wild Robot and Inside Out 2, Flow was nominated for animated feature in top precursors like BAFTA, PGA, and Critics Choice. Flow, which debuted at the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes, has also received a Best International Feature Film nomination (a first for Latvia), showing that it has some genuine momentum. The movie is, after all, adorable, and it plays well both to kids and anyone with a creative bent. Though Sanders is known in the industry, relative newcomer Zimbalodis has been traveling hard with Flow since its debut, and influencer screenings have been met warmly. Considering that last year went to Boy and the Heron over Elemental and Spider-Verse, this would not be too surprising of an upset win.
Underdog: Inside Out 2
It says a lot about the quality of The Wild Robot and Flow that Inside Out 2 is the underdog. The Pixar sequel is, in fact, the highest-grossing animated film in history, with a nearly $1.7 billion haul. (Were we to adjust for inflation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would actually have that beat, but what do you expect: those guys are working in a gem mine all day!)
Despite the earnings, Inside Out didn’t quite stick to our culture’s ribs like the original did. Critics’ scores were still pretty impressive — with a 91 percent at Rotten Tomatoes and a 73 at Metacritic — but the movie fell into some sequel retread traps.
Pixar has more wins in this category (11) than any studio, and while it’s been since Soul in 2021 that they took home the prize, it would be surprising if Inside Out 2 was the 12th, considering the intense competition. And yet, the entire Academy gets to vote in this category, not just the animation branch. It’s always possible that this is the only one they saw, or there’s an “I dunno, go with Pixar” faction when it comes time to vote. Anything is possible.
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