2011 marks the tenth year the Oscars have singled out animated films for their own Best Animated Feature Oscar and I started looking over the list of nominees and began to wonder how they might match up with public opinion.
In ten years 34 films have been nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, eight of those nominees have been Pixar films, five of which went on to win with Cars and Monsters, Inc. serving as the two that didn’t end up taking home the gold. So Pixar has obviously been crowned king by the Academy, and this year I think we’re all expecting Toy Story 3 to make it six wins for the animated studio. Does this mean the top eight animated films over the past ten years were produced by Pixar?
Of course, this isn’t an exact science. Looking at only the Academy’s animated nominees means several films aren’t even eligible for the conversation even though many of you may consider them “better”. This includes films such as Tokyo Godfathers, Appleseed, Steamboy, Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, Hoodwinked, Robots, A Scanner Darkly, Arthur and the Invisibles, Flushed Away, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Open Season, Over the Hedge, Paprika, Tekkon Kinkreet, The Ant Bully, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, Appleseed Ex Machina, Battle for Terra, Bee Movie, Beowulf, Meet the Robinsons, TMNT, $9.99, Horton Hears a Who!, Sita Sings the Blues, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Waltz with Bashir, 9, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Monsters vs. Aliens, A Town Called Panic, Despicable Me, Legend of the Guardians, Megamind, My Dog Tulip, Tangled or any number of films I didn’t mention that never received an Oscar nomination.
So let’s push the idea that there are obviously animated films that didn’t get recognized by the Academy that some of us may consider better than those that were nominated out of our head and begin looking at the films they did nominate. Of the following 34 films, which ones are your favorites? Are you a Pixar fan to the point you’ll littler your list with the likes of WALL-E, Ratatouille, Up, The Incredibles and Finding Nemo? Do you hold no allegiance and will scatter your picks from foreign, to stop motion, to hand drawn and then CG?
Looking at the films below Fantastic Mr. Fox, Spirited Away, Wallace and Gromit, WALL-E and Ratatouille would probably be my top five, but I could substitute any number of them at any given moment depending on my mood. How about you?
Pick five films from the following 34 as your “favorite” of the moment and then comment below with some of the films that weren’t nominated in the last ten years that you would prefer to have voted for. I’m sure some of you probably have some favorites that I didn’t even list above.
