Oscar Nominated Animated Films

The Oscars manage to shine a light specifically on animation by having one of its featured categories, ‘Best Animated Feature.’ This has brought all new films to the Oscars, including popular animated comedies that shined culturally, gritty adult animated films, & some niche indie animations as well. This category was instituted in 2002, for films released in 2001, giving animation a place to shine ever since. (Also please see the thumbnail picture of Shrek & Donkey at the Oscars learning their film won the award. They should do that again). But sometimes, they leave the category made specifically for them, earning nominations in one of the Oscars many other categories. Today we will look at all those times that animated films earned Oscar nominations for categories other than ‘Best Animated Feature.’

Best Picture - In the history of the Academy Awards, three animated films have earned Best Picture nomination honors. The first of these was 1991’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ which is probably the most impressive feat on this whole list because the Animated Feature category didn’t yet exist, and the Best Picture nominee list had not yet been expanded to 10 films, meaning it earned one of 5 coveted nomination spots. Then, nearly two decades later, we would get to back to back years with animated Best Picture nominees with Pixar’s two best films, ‘Up’ & ‘Toy Story 3.’ None of these three took home Best Picture, but the latter two did win Best Animated Feature.

Best International Feature - Just like with Best Picture, there have been three times an animated film has earned a nomination in this category, though no win has come yet. The first of these was the 2008 Israeli film, ‘Waltz with Bashir.’ Next came 2021’s ‘Flee’ which earned a nomination for Denmark, and most recently was ‘Flow’ which earned a nomination for Latvia, and won Best Animated Feature.

Best Documentary - Not only did ‘Flee’ get a nomination for Best International Feature, it also got a nomination for Best Documentary at the 94th Academy Awards. When you take those, add in its Best Animated Feature nomination, it becomes the only film to ever be nomination in all three of those categories.

Best Original & Adapted Screenplay - There have been 9 animated films to earn a nomination for writing, though again, none of the 9 won. Interestingly 8 of the 9 came from Pixar, with the sole non-Pixar writing nominee being ‘Shrek’ which was nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 74th Awards. The only other animated film to be nominated in the Best Adapted Screenplay was ‘Toy Story 3.’ So, the other 7 films which were all nominated in Best Original Screenplay are: ‘Toy Story,’ ‘Finding Nemo,’ ‘The Incredibles,’ ‘Ratatouille,’ ‘WALL-E,’ ‘Up,’ and ‘Inside Out.’

I’m going to exclude the music categories of Best Original Score & Best Original Song for this list because there has been more overlap with these and animated films than all the other categories combined. It would just be a long list of films that would probably not be fun to read.

Best Sound - There have been a handful of different sound awards, which are now just combined into Best Sound. But we actually have three different categories we’ll be exploring. The first is Best Sound Mixing, which has had 4 animated nominees. At the 77th Awards there were two nominees, ‘The Incredibles’ & ‘The Polar Express,’ and then there were back to back nominees at the 80th & 81st Awards with ‘Ratatouille’ & ‘WALL-E.’ Then if we look at Best Sound Editing, there are 9 nominees, with our first win! The win came at the 77th Awards for ‘The Incredibles’ which was nominated again alongside ‘The Polar Express.’ Prior nominees were ‘Aladdin,’ ‘Monsters, Inc.,’ & ‘Finding Nemo,’ and nominees to follow were ‘Ratatouille,’ ‘WALL-E,’ ‘Up,’ & ‘Toy Story 3.’ Then if we look at the previously instated & now reinstated category of Best Sound there are 6 total nominees, ‘Bambi,’ ‘Cinderella,’ ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ ‘Aladdin,’ ‘Soul,’ & ‘The Wild Robot.’

And our last category is Best Visual Effects which has had three animated nominees, and honestly should probably have more since the entirety of the genre is visual effects. The 3 nominees are ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas,’ ‘Kubo and the Two Strings,’ & 2019’s ‘The Lion King,’ the last of these I would not personally classify as an animated film.

There have also been a handful of animated films that have received Honorary Awards including ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’ ‘Fantasia,’ ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit,’ and ‘Toy Story.’