The Oscars are a yearly award show that celebrate the medium of film by nominating and awarding movies based on many different categories. This year’s show will be on Hulu, broadcasted on ABC, and will fall on March 2, 2025.

For example, some of the categories include: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Adapted screenplay and, for the topic of today’s discussion, the award for Best Animated Feature. 

The award for Best Animated Feature was introduced in 2001 and was created after “Beauty and the Beast” was nominated for Best Picture in 1991. The Oscar Academy felt this didn’t totally match the Best Picture category, so they created Best Animated Picture and made it its own separate category. 

The Award has felt very pandering to big studios like Pixar and Disney for many years now, but over the last few years we’ve had more and more unique animated films that take the medium of animation to new heights be nominated or even win. We’ve had films like Guillmero del Toro’s “Pinocchio,” “Spiderman into the Spiderverse,” “Boy and the heron” and “Nimona” be nominated and/or win this award, which has been amazing to see!

On Jan. 23, 2025, the Nominees for “Best Animated Feature” were announced as follows:

“Flow,” “Inside Out 2,” “The Wild Robot,” “Memoir of a snail,” and “Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl”.

Most, if not all, of these nominees were expected for this list but nonetheless this is a very good lineup of movies being nominated; it’s probably the best we’ve had in years. While the roster is very good, the competition of “who’s gonna win” is really between two candidates: “The Wild Robot” and “Flow.”

“Flow” was created by the small company “Dream Well Studio” which is situated in Latvia. 

The film follows a Cat as its home is devastated by a great flood, and will have to team up with other various animals on a boat despite their differences to survive the flood. Flow has gone on to win numerous awards including the 82nd Golden Globe award for animated feature film and multiple foreign film awards. 

“The Wild Robot” was created by the large company Dreamworks Animation which is located in Glendale, California. The film follows a robot named Roz as she gets stranded on an island with many animals and learns how to become a mother to a little gosling she affectionately names “Brightbill”. The film is very critically acclaimed and has gone on to win a Saturn Award for Best Animated Feature and 2 Online Film Critics Society Awards (one for best animated and one for best score.)

While both of these films are good, my prediction for what’s going to win the Oscar for best animated feature is definitely “The Wild Robot”. “The Wild Robot” just has way more going for it, a fantastic and beautiful story, amazing animation and stellar voice acting but the film is also backed by a large studio, that being Dreamworks. 

The Oscars are prestigious but they aren’t perfect. The ceremony is filled with segments to boost celebrities ego’s and promote larger companies like Disney, Warner Bros, and Universal, the last of which owns Dreamworks. And in many cases with the Oscars the most popular films owned by larger companies get nominated and win more often than limited release films made by smaller studios. This isn’t to say that big studios win every time though. 

In 2023, Director Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinnochio” won best animated feature and in 2024 Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” also won best animated feature, both films aren’t exactly the smallest movies to be nominated but in terms of what usually win, which in the past has usually been a Disney or Pixar film, those films are much more indie and small in comparison. 

But even with all of this being said, “The Wild Robot” is an extraordinary film that deserves best animated feature film if it gets it. And besides, this isn’t a terrible thing for “Flow” if it doesn’t win Best Animated feature. The film got so much awareness through not only this nomination but also the nomination for “Best International Feature Film” which it might have a chance at winning. This year’s Oscar ceremony is shaping up to be a really special one due to the very solid nominations for practically every category so I’m definitely looking forward to it.