(NEXSTAR) – Animated films are among some of the most beloved, critically acclaimed and top-grossing movies in cinema history. And yet, very few have ever been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.
The first animated film to receive the honor, Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” was in the running for Best Picture at the 1992 ceremony — a full decade before the Academy added a specific Animated Feature category. That year, “Beauty and the Beast” would go on to win Oscars for Best Original Score and Best Original Song, but lose out to “Silence of the Lambs” for the night’s top award.
“My feeling is that had it not been for ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ ‘Beauty and the Beast’ could have won,” Arlene Ludwig, a publicity director for the Walt Disney Company, told The Hollywood Reporter in a 2022 retrospective.
Not everyone agreed, apparently. Kirk Wise, the co-director of “Beauty and the Beast,” remembered hearing less-than-kind words about his film being included among that year’s Best Picture nominees.
“There were those in the awards broadcast who had to be snarky and pooh-poohed the notion of a ‘cartoon’ being included with ‘real movies,” he told Vulture in 2023.
At one point during the ceremony, Sally Field introduced a clip of “Beauty and the Beast” by pointing out how “no actors appeared on screen,” appearing to suggest its nomination was more of an anomaly than a milestone.
“We members of the Screen Actors Guild hope this doesn’t become a trend,” she joked.
Despite the film’s failure to capture the Best Picture prize — and by multiple accounts, because of it — Disney and other Hollywood studios upped their game, sending their animation teams back to the drawing board for fresh, hopefully award-worthy material.
Don Hahn, the producer of “Beauty and the Beast,” remembered the Best Picture nomination being a “big turning point.”
“It was a chance to say, ‘Wow, we really did a very cool thing with this movie, and maybe changed the course of animation a little bit,” he told Entertainment Weekly in a 2012 interview.
Over the following decade, animated productions became more expensive and technically advanced. And with an abundance of these (sometimes groundbreaking) animated films hitting theaters in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, the Academy introduced an all-new category for Best Animated Feature. The news, however, came as both a blessing and a curse for studios, as it provided the Academy with an easy way to recognize animated films without considering those same films for the Best Picture category, members of the industry have theorized.
“I heard rumblings within the Academy that that’s really why that category was established. They did not want animated films competing for Best Picture,” Disney publicist Christine La Monte told The Hollywood Reporter.
Films including “Shrek,” “Spirited Away,” “The Incredibles” “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” and “Wall-E” were among early winners in the Best Animated Feature category. But none had received a nod for Best Picture.
Then, in 2009, the Academy expanded the Best Picture category to include 10 nominees instead of the usual five. That year, Disney and Pixar’s “Up” became the second-ever film to earn a Best Picture nod. And the following year, “Toy Story 3” repeated the feat. Both films ended up winning in the Best Animated Feature category, but “Up” ultimately lost Best Picture to “The Hurt Locker,” and “Toy Story 3″ lost to “The King’s Speech” in the same category.
Not a single animated film since — no matter how well reviewed — has been nominated for Best Picture. In 2022, the Academy was also accused of downplaying the appeal of animated films after presenters at the ceremony introduced the Best Animated Feature category by repeatedly suggesting the medium is for children.
“Super cool to position animation as something that kids watch and adults have to endure,” director and filmmaker Phil Lord (“Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” “The Lego Movie,” “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”) said of their remarks and others.
Filmmakers who believe in the appeal of animation, in the meantime, continue to push for the genre to be taken more seriously.
“It’s been a great year for cinema … and therefore it’s been a great year for animation, because animation is cinema,” Guillermo Del Toro began his speech at the Golden Globes in 2023, after winning the Best Animated Motion Picture award for “Pinocchio.”
“Animation is not a genre for kids; it’s a medium.”
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