“Best Animated Film” is the Academy Awards’ most broken category

This year marked the 90th Academy Awards for Motion Pictures, most commonly known as The Oscars. Hundreds of films competed in numerous categories to be voted on by the roughly 7000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Among those awards was “Best Animated Feature”, a category that has existed for even less time than 3D animation as a whole, surprisingly. The first award was given to the 2001 film Shrek and the category has existed since...almost largely as a joke. Of all the categories the Oscars offer, this one is notoriously the most arbitrary.

I don’t say that lightly, but there are a few key reasons why I draw this conclusion. There’s a general ignorance of the medium among the Academy’s voters, and also an unwillingness to watch all the films in the category yet still vote on the winner. And I empathize, no one should be obligated to watch every single film that comes out in a given year. I do, however, have tremendous issue with anyone that refers to The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Japan) and The Song of the Sea (Ireland) as “Chinese f***ing things no one even freakin’ saw”, does not to watch them, and then votes for Big Hero 6 because their kids liked it. An extreme case, true, but not altogether uncommon.

The main reason I want to talk about the Oscars is a result of this year’s nominations: The Breadwinner, Loving Vincent, and Coco all made sense, but then you have Ferdinand and The Boss Baby.

But hey, maybe there weren’t enough decent animated films this year to compete. I mean, In this Corner of the World, A Silent Voice, Mary and the Witch’s Flower? Probably some “Chinese things no one ever saw.”  Ethel and Ernest, Birdboy: The Forgotten Children, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, Window Horses, The Big Bad Fox & Other Tales? Never heard of ‘em, probably some “weird European kid stuff”. Probably better to just focus on good ol’ fashioned American made, what could possibly go wrong?

I want to be clear: I’m not here to just berate the chosen films. Truth is, The Boss Baby was significantly better than expected. It’s still fairly mediocre, but it’s definitely not terrible. What I’m more concerned with is the selection itself, and the factors that make it possible for The Boss Baby — a film that has done nothing to meaningfully advance the medium of animation or film culture in general — to stand on the same pedestal as the oil canvas cornucopia Loving Vincent or the somber and fierce beauty The Breadwinner, and above so many other films that actually challenge the medium both tonally and artistically. It’s only possible when the award isn’t accomplishing or promoting what it’s meant to, meaning the category is broken. What I want to understand is how “Best Animated Feature” ended up so broken, and ask if and how we can fix it.

Past - The most predictable category in the Oscars

Award Cabinet from the Pixar Front Lobby.
Pixar has won 9 Oscars for Best Animated Feature out of 16 eligible films.

“Best Animated Feature” is still adolescent as an Oscar category. The Academy has been handing these awards out for 90 years, but this will only be the 17th year this award has existed. Prior to 2001, animated feature films have been given rather limited recognition at the Oscars. Only on three prior occasions did animated films win any awards, and those were honorary or special achievement awards for astounding technical achievement: Toy Story, for being the first feature length computer-animated film; Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, for overall animation direction and seamlessly blending live action with animation; and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves for basically inventing animated feature films. Until the category existed, animated feature films never appeared in any other Oscar category outside of the music categories, with Beauty and the Beast (1991) being the sole exception as one of only three ever animated nominees for “Best Picture” (the others being Up in 2009, and Toy Story 3 in 2010, both released after the category was made).

"Best Animated Feature" is structured to have a minimum shortlist of three nominees, which is extended to five in the case of at least 16 submissions to the category. Luckily, animation has been constantly growing as an industry, so the shortlist has remained locked at five nominees for the last decade and likely won’t revert. 2017 had 26 eligible films, which is one short of 2016’s yield, but is still high and signifies overall growth.

There have been 16 awards given in this category thus far, and the winners have ranged widely from films made in America by Disney to films made in America by Disney-owned Pixar, and I guess a couple other outliers here and there. That isn’t an exaggeration; either Disney or Pixar have won the Oscar all but two of the years in which they’ve entered (Spirited Away won over Treasure Planet and Lilo and Stitch, and Shrek somehow beat Monsters Inc.). There is no other category in the Oscars that has been so absolutely dominated by a single company like this, and a lot of that might come down to how these films are voted for.

The proportions (as of 2016) are pretty heavily favoring a couple companies.
2017’s winner was also Pixar (Coco).

The voting system is actually pretty simple: There are many different branches of the Academy covering a variety of film disciplines (Acting, Directing, Writing, etc.). Each branch solely votes on the categories they are closest related towards. “Best Animated Feature” was handled primarily by the “Short and Feature Animation” branch, which also covers “Best Animated Short” and “Best Live Action Short”. This branch would vote for the top five films among the eligible and, after tons of accounting, the shortlist is created, commonly referred to as “the nominees”. After the shortlist is made, every member of the academy is allowed to votes towards the shortlist to determine the winner, regardless of branch. Here’s the quick summary — Eligible movies are narrowed down to five by a specialized branch, and voted down to one by the whole Academy. It’s overall a good system, but there are issues definitely worth pointing out.

For starters, there’s an issue of diversity. Ninety percent of Academy members are Caucasian, seventy percent are men, and the mean age is 65 years old. Granted, this doesn’t make them unqualified, but it does mean there’s a large bias towards elder, Caucasian, male sensibilities. While this doesn’t make it impossible for foreign films to thrive, it does mean the odds of them being nominated are low. For example, Your Name, arguably one of the best films to come out in 2016, was snubbed a nomination to Moana, the second Disney film to receive a nomination that year. It also means that, regardless of nominations, the winner is heavily favored to be something these members or their children have at least heard of. This means there’s a heavy swing towards the popular choices. It’s a shame, but there’s a severe lack of knowledge and understanding within the Academy when it comes to animation as an artform. When the most a voter can say about animation is that they don’t like “Chinese things that nobody saw”, it’s not difficult to assume they don’t know anything about the category they’re voting on. So it’s not too surprising that the giant Disney and Pixar films keep winning: the voters haven’t heard of or likely even watched the other films. And, as both I and many others predicted, Coco took home the gold this year.

To make these matters worse, there was a critical change made to the voting process this year. Instead of letting the specialized branch of industry professionals decide the shortlist, the nomination process for “Best Animated Feature” has been opened to all academy members. At least before there was a decent chance to see more arthouse and indie nominations, but now even the shortlist is basically reduced to a popular vote. The only other category in which this method exists is “Best Picture”, which makes more sense since it’s an all encompassing award, and can facilitate the traffic with its larger 10-slot shortlist. It makes no sense to do this with “Best Animated Feature” since it’s a lot more specialized of a category, and as clearly noted has far less working knowledge to go around. So in case you’re wondering how something like Ferdinand or The Boss Baby makes it to the nomination stage, its because the new system even more heavily favored American made, big studio films. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if The Boss Baby made it to the nomination stage solely on the back of John Travolta’s Glengary Glen Ross references, or if Ferdinand made it because people in hollywood might know who John Cena is.

Present - Is it actually broken?

Some of these things are not like the others.

There are issues with the system’s selection process, but does that mean the winning films don’t deserve their victories? Not entirely. The animated films that have been winning “Best Animated Feature” are great films (mostly). All things considered, Coco was easily one of the best animated films that came out in 2017, and aside from being solid throughout it’s also especially meaningful both in its subject matter and through its unique creation (small intimate cultural story coming out of massive studio, which is exceedingly rare). That being said, if it were up to me, I’d have preferred to give this year’s award to either The Breadwinner or Loving Vincent, and I have reasons that don’t solely involve just subjective taste.

Let’s start with a key question: “What exactly does winning an Oscar mean?” Out of dozens or possibly hundreds of eligible films, what does it mean to place exactly one of them above all others? It’s difficult for these awards to be truly objective as all nominations have such wildly different factors fueling them creatively, artistically, and even culturally. That being said, there are still measurable qualities in which theses films can be judged, which is made more apparent via other Oscar categories. Acting awards judge the quality of the actor’s performance against the difficulty and complexity of capturing a given character. They can also reflect the amount an actor sacrifices in order to make a role truly convincing (Ex: Heath Ledger won “Best Supporting Actor” postmortem for his harrowing performance as “The Joker” in The Dark Knight). Editing and technical awards are judged on proficiency and utilization of skills, easily recognized as contributing heavily to the overall quality or style of the film (even though it lost, my favorite nomination this year for “Best Film Editing” was Baby Driver, a film literally defined through its editing). Because “Best Picture” is more open ended, it makes sense that the category would have wider spread voting right from the get-go and even widened to 10 slots instead of the standard 3-5.  So where does this leave “Best Animated Feature”?

Here’s the hurdle: “What does Best Animated Feature actually judge?” Animation is a unique stylistic and mechanical form of expression, very different from traditional film. Instead of a live performance, the entire film is hand-crafted. There are fewer creative limits with animation, allowing for a wider range of expression than is normally possible. In return, that expression comes with the challenge of being harder to reproduce with exact purpose (harder, but not impossible). Outside of that, animated film can be judged on most of the same merits that define other films: cinematography, performance, story, significance (cultural or otherwise), sound and music, editing, technical quality, and various other attributes (plus some unique ones, like voice acting). With all those factors considered, what is the main focus of “Best Animated Feature?” Well, the unfortunate answer is that there isn’t one. Currently, the award is treated very similarly to “Best Picture” with every possible voter offering a “general” opinion, but that doesn’t effectively work when there’s so little overall knowledge of the animation industry/process within the Academy (and it doesn’t have the fluid advantage of ten slots either).

Everything these films have in common: They both use stop-motion animation,
and both were nominated for Best Animated Feature in the same year. That’s about it.

Well, what if we were comparing it to something like “Best Picture”, in which the focus is on overall excellence, impact and significance within the film medium? That’s a surprisingly hard sell, since many of the winners so far have often had one but not the others. Big Hero 6 is overall excellent, but doesn’t carry impact or any real significance outside of being a good film. Frozen certainly carried tons of impact, and has a certain decree of meta-textual significance within Disney’s framework, but it has too many structural flaws to be truly excellent. Heck, some of the past winners don’t exhibit any of those traits; Brave, Rango and Happy Feet haven’t carried any weight moving forward (Brave is the closest to having any degree of impact). I’m certainly not saying that we haven’t had films that fit all three categories; several I can name on hand include Spirited Away, Up, and Zootopia. In fact, Coco fits the bill as well by being overall excellent, culturally significant, and positively impactful to the Latino community. But on that front, I would still be more inclined to award more favor to The Breadwinner due to its empowered impact and significance via intense and brutal transparency, while still being overall excellent. Nevertheless, judging this category on the same merits as “Best Picture” only make sense if everyone voting has as powerful a framework for “Best Animated Feature” as they do for the former, and it’s proven very clear that the average Academy voter does not.

So what if instead we treated it like a technical award, in which the focus is on the overall quality of animation and general craftsmanship? Maybe that classification hits a bit closer to home, and works with more of the winners, at least on paper. Brave, Happy Feet, and Rango are all kinda messy plot-wise, but they all sport solid animation (especially Brave), distinct visual design (especially Rango), and overall excellent staging and/or rendering (especially Happy Feet). That should fix everything up then, yeah? Well, now you also have to think about the films that didn’t win a lot of these years despite being overall more artistic or showing stronger craftsmanship. It’s hard to imagine Rango’s quirky semi-realistic 3D competing strongly against the hard outlines and beautiful Cuban inspired stylization of Chico and Rita. It’s even harder to imagine Brave’s overall lack of strong visual style losing to either Wreck-It-Ralph’s intensely colorful retro game aesthetic, or Paranorman’s...everything. If the focus was more technically/artistically minded, Frozen probably would’ve lost to Ernest and Celestine or The Wind Rises, Big Hero 6 would’ve struggled against The Song of the Sea and The Tale of Princess Kaguya (yes, those “Chinese things no one saw”). This year, I’m not sure how anything could possibly compare to Loving Vincent; it’s truly one of a kind. It might be possible to judge this category on a purely technical level, but that hasn’t been the case so far. This combined with the transition away from branch-focused nominations to general ones, makes it pretty clear the Academy is steering away from technical specifics in favor of broader knowledge.

If we were only judging by technical achievement, The Good Dinosaur’s experimental rendering technique would’ve been more than enough to beat Inside Out.

In the current landscape, “Best Animated Feature” suffers from two key deficiencies: lack of knowledge or understanding within the Academy, and lack of critical purpose or identity. This issue goes a lot farther than a simple matter of taste, it’s too structural for that. “Best Animated Feature” is definitely a broken category.

Future - Where do we go from here?

Could this be next year's winner? Current predictions say yes.

So what exactly is the solution to these structural issues? Should “Best Animated Feature” simply be removed as a category? In starting this article, I originally sought that removal because the category ultimately undermines Animation as a medium of film on a core level. A crucial fact often forgotten is that animation is an artform, not a genre. Labeling animation as a genre carries an immense negative implication. In the hands of the talented, animation has the ability to stand side by side with the best of live-action filmmaking. Animated films have no constraints against live film when it comes to narrative and cinematic qualities, and have unique constraints and opportunities in their visuals and character performances. It doesn’t make sense keeping animated films in a separate category because ultimately they aren’t inherently superior or inferior to non-animated films.

The existence of the category also diminishes the ability of animation to perform elsewhere. Currently, there’s almost no chance of an animated film ever being nominated for “Best Picture” since it’s much easier to just dump them in their own category. While it is nice that animated films are guaranteed at least one award each year, the award provides far too easy an excuse for the Academy to segregate animated films from other categories, almost a safeguard guaranteeing that they never have to take these films seriously.

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Yet despite those reasons, the category should not be abolished. Even if “Best Animated Feature” was extinguished, the act provides no guarantee of animation gaining any influence within the Academy. It’s entirely possible that without the award, animated features would simply never be nominated. Not to mention that “Best Animated Feature” is still a relatively new category, not even two decades old, and is bound to run into plenty of hiccups before becoming respectable. This year notwithstanding, the category has been slowly showing overall improvement. Even though the winners are still awfully predictable, the nomination selections have been much more potent. And regardless of how you feel about the Oscars as a whole, the truth is that even the nominations do matter and are important.

There are a lot of people that watch the Oscars every year. Those that don’t will probably hear about the winners and nominees at some point. When a film is nominated, it suddenly gets placed on a higher level in the public eye, and because most of the films chosen are generally indie and arthouse films, it allows the Academy to highlight otherwise esoteric cinema. One of the roles served through the Oscars is that or exposure, which for many smaller animated and live action films is a huge benefit in finding an audience. You would’ve been hard pressed to find a theater showing The Shape of Water, but thanks to all the buzz its Oscar status has generated, it’s become increasingly accessible. This works with animated films as well. The Breadwinner only grossed a paltry $220k during its theater run and Loving Vincent didn’t fare much better. But with their nominations, they have generated massive waves of curiosity from the millions that probably didn’t know they existed. Heck, the former of those recently showed up on Netflix and got a huge number of views.

But there are definitely places where the award should improve.  For one, this year’s changes to the nomination process absolutely must be reverted. Allowing the Animation Academy branch to select the shortlist empowers the vote by favoring artistic movies over popular ones. It also creates greater contention within the category, inviting a more exciting outcome.

Second, it would help if voters were discouraged from voting unless they saw every nominated film in a given category. Unless the judge has experienced all of the nominations, then his or her vote holds no facility. Furthermore, there are enormous issues with the “For your consideration” campaigns. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a beacon of excellence, and should act as such. To be fair, I also have enormous issues with “For your consideration” campaigns and much of the overall politics of the Oscars, but the problems plaguing “Best Animated Feature” are more significant than that (Heck, I almost wish the category was so harshly contested that people ran campaigns for votes).

Finally, we need a well informed voting base. The members of the Academy are some of the finest professionals in their respective fields, but it’s staggering how little they know about animation; especially since it’s one of the hallmarks of film (going all the way back to 1937). It’s great that the nominees are often varied, but it’s often called “The Pixar Award” for a reason: there isn’t enough working knowledge of the medium to vote for anything else. This ultimately falls back to acknowledging animation as an artform, not a genre, and learning that it has the ability to deliver narrative and emotion with the same capacity as live action. It definitely doesn’t help that the Academy’s diversity is still sorely lacking, but at least we’re starting to see signs of improvement.

I’m confident that as time chugs along, animation will continue to grow and inspire in greater ways, and it’s my hope that the Academy notices and learns to respect it sooner rather than later.

And finally, congratulations to Coco, and a round of applause to all the films that made 2017 another awesome year for animation.