Oscar Blitz 2025 – Animated Feature (VIDEO)

I got a rather lovely phone call the other day. It was from my sister. We chat all the time, but usually it’s me calling her, not the other way around. She and her family had been dealing with a pretty nasty stomach bug for the previous few days, depositing nearly all the liquid in their bodies into various receptacles for disposal. We’ve all been there. It’s particularly harsh on my nephew, Teddy, because he’s only six years old, and his immune system is still developing. Sis and I remember all too well how often we’d do our own personal Linda Blair impressions at his age. It’s even more pronounced for the boy, because his school requires a minimum of 24 hours of medical testing and updates before he’s allowed to go back to class after a sick day, so between random illnesses and snow days (they live in upstate New York, which at times is colder than Alaska and gets more snow than Minnesota in winter), one bit of undercooked chicken could result in missing a week of school. Thank God he’s a smart kid (they considered skipping him from kindergarten to 3rd grade at one point last year), or else he’d never be able to keep up.

However, this latest bout of collective sickies allowed for a nice family moment. All three of them finally sat down and watched The Wild Robot, which I had gotten them for Christmas. My sister cried throughout, my brother-in-law even choked up a couple of times, and Teddy was enraptured. He even understood why my sister was tearing up. “Oh, it’s because Brightbill is Roz’s baby, and I’m your baby,” he said, according to the report. It’s not the first time he’s been very emotionally intuitive for his age.

He also said one other important thing. He told my sister that he’d like to be an animator when he grows up. Now, obviously, he’s got plenty of time to figure all this out, but this is the first time he’s ever expressed an interest in any sort of career, other than being Spider-Man, of course. Also, many kids feel that desire at some point, because they spend their early lives surrounded by cartoons. I said the same thing myself when I was eight or nine. In fact I remember specifying that I wanted to be a Disney animator.

There are two big differences between Teddy and myself at his age. One is that I could never draw. No matter how hard I tried, it’s just a skill I was never able to acquire. I think I’ve told the stories about my high school art class and the unintentionally surrealist creations I made simply because I couldn’t handle shape and scale. Teddy, however, is really good at drawing, at least for this stage of his life. His teachers have noted this. He’s able to become very focused when creating an image, he colors within lines with an almost planned method, and he uses creative color combinations rather than just scribbling. Kids start to develop skills and passions around the age of four, and this may be one of his talents for later in life.

The second is his motivation. When I was young, I just wanted to make cartoons because cartoons were fun. I’ve even said as an adult that I’d love to see a fully animated version of myself one day, or get to voice a character in animation so it could feel like I have an animated avatar. When I first moved to L.A., a roommate of mine who worked at Fox actually had a contact on The Simpsons, and for Christmas he got that person to draw me Springfield-style (similar to the “Simpsonize Me” website), based on my mildly viral spectacular loss on Jeopardy! earlier that year. We’re no longer friends, but that picture is one of my most prized possessions.

Teddy, on the other hand, is much more focused. He was so enchanted by The Wild Robot and its story, that he told my sister that he wanted to be an animator so he could make something like that, something that made people cry in the good way. That warmed my heart like nothing else in a while, and it’s a testament to what I loved so much about the movie. As I mentioned when I reviewed it, there’s a lot of dark humor, making this closer to an 80s kids movie than a 21st Century one, but it’s committed to letting the kids experience it and process it in their own way, laughing with their parents rather than being shielded from it. As evidence of why this is a net positive, it appears that he got it. He understood the jokes, the tension, the action, and the pathos, and it’s inspired him to aspire to something similar. Whether he holds on these specific ambitions is another matter entirely, but the sentiment behind it is what will make him a great person someday, even better than he is already.

That’s why I love animation.

This year’s nominees for Animated Feature are… in the video below!

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I wish this contest was as competitive every year as it appears to be this year. Based on Awards Season results, it would seem that The Wild Robot is in the catbird seat, but both Flow and Memoir of a Snail have also picked up some hardware, so nothing is set in stone. For such a rich artform, the worst years are the ones where this category is locked up well in advance. I still remember being downhearted five years ago when Toy Story 4‘s victory was so assured that it was the first presentation of the night. That should never happen.

My Rankings:
Are in the video.

Who do you think should win? Vote now in the poll below!

Now, as I do with the specialty feature categories every year, I make a concerted effort to see everything available. There’s no shortlist for Animated Feature, only the list of eligible submissions, of which there were 31 for the 2024 season. I wanted to go for completion, but two of the titles were never made available for home viewing, so I de-prioritized this category in favor of Documentary and International Feature. That said, I still took in 24 of the candidates, so as always, here are the complete rankings, or at least as complete as I could make them.

1) Memoir of a Snail
2) The Imaginary
3) Flow
4) The Wild Robot
5) Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
6) The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
7) Chicken for Linda!
8) Inside Out 2
9) Ultraman: Rising
10) Living Large
11) Art College 1994
12) Ghost Cat Anzu
13) Sirocco and the Kingdom of Winds
14) The Glassworker
15) The Colors Within
16) Moana 2
17) Despicable Me 4
18) The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
19) Kung Fu Panda 4
20) Thelma the Unicorn
21) Sultana’s Dream
22) That Christmas
23) The Garfield Movie
24) Spellbound

If you want a general idea of the quality, 1-15 are good to great (with the top eight being truly special), 16-18 are less enthusiastic recommendations based on one key element (usually the animation itself), and 19-24 are just bad movies.

Up next, the Blitz is off for the weekend, but as usual, I’m keeping busy. I’ll be covering the Slamdance Festival for my friends at No Rest for the Weekend, and somehow I’ll still find time to deliver the first new movie reviews for 2025, starting with Dog Man and Companion. Then, on Monday, we enter the home stretch of this year’s Blitz, and since I clearly have animation on the brain, we might as well stick to it. It’s Animated Short!

Join the conversation in the comments below! How many of these films did you see? Did your favorite even get nominated? Did you ever dream of being an animator? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!