Is 2024 Best Animated Feature Set in Stone?

It’s the most wonderful and tedious time of the year. It’s award season.  It’s the time of year when we judge and grade films on whether they should win awards or not. When it comes to animation, it tends to be whoever will win or try to win against Disney/Pixar, since they tend to take the awards at almost every single Oscars. 

It’s not always the case with the Golden Globes and the Annies, but there is usually a good chance of Disney taking at the very least, the one major animated feature award at the Oscars. In the last couple of years, they have not, due to them losing out in 2022 to Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio, and in 2023 to The Boy and the Heron. Not that they didn’t have a film worth awarding with Pixar’s Turning Red and Pixar’s Elemental, but the voters have simply awarded something else, and that is hopefully a good sign for what is to come with this upcoming Oscar season with a few films that could easily outshine Inside Out 2’s success, like Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail, the film festival favorite Flow, and the other big fish in the pond, Chris Sander’s DreamWorks film The Wild Robot. It’s honestly a toss-up between whether Inside Out 2 or The Wild Robot will be the big winner, and whether the other films will simply be happy enough to show up and or even be nominated. 

The big battle is whether DreamWorks and Pixar/Disney’s big title will be the winner, and to be honest, while my fictional betting money is on The Wild Robot winning, I don’t think either of their roads to Oscars is as clean-cut as folks think they are. I have had a theory that maybe they will face pushback in getting to the red carpet. I’m not saying either will get nominated because it would be absurd for both to miss out, but this could be another year where Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks lose the title to another distributor or studio.

 A lot of this will be on the fact that they might suffer an Across the Spider-Verse situation, where behind-the-scenes production problems and other award-season voting biases come into play. What am I talking about? Well, the big battle last year was between Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron and Sony’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, with them both being the big beloved animated films that were taking up the spotlight, alongside a few other films like Robot Dreams, Elemental, and Nimona.  However, despite being probably the most overall beloved film of the year, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse lost. A lot of that could be because of either its cliffhanger ending, or the fact sequels don’t tend to win anything at Oscars, but what may have killed its chances a bit was the expose that came out that explained the bad working conditions and Lord and Miller’s indecisive decisions in filmmaking and mistreatment of animators that pushed them out of the first place spot.

Now then, let’s talk about why this could affect Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot’s chances. Again, this might not fully hurt them, but they may cause enough friction within the voting body to make things not so clean-cut. 

Let’s start with Pixar’s entry with Inside Out 2. Yes, it’s critically beloved and one of the most successful animated films of the year. Why would it have any chance of its possible Oscar win being taken from it? Well, it not only has the sequel issue that voters push back against winning, but it also had a lot of bad press about the working conditions at the surprisingly non-unionized Pixar, which overworked their artists, and how a huge group of the animation team was laid off before they could get bonuses for the film being successful. Disney’s higher-ups screwed over the very people that made their films to save a few bucks. On top of the voters not always rewarding sequels with Oscar wins, the voters are probably not too fond of wanting to award a company that has royally screwed over its talent and creatives who are among the voting piers. They all have colleagues within the industry and voting body, they are all keeping tabs on one another. Even Moana 2, despite its lack of any real award chances, would suffer from this due to how Disney screwed over its Vancouver studio by changing the limited series into a movie, but not upgrading the worker’s contracts to pay for film rates. Disney has looked like an even bigger villain overall than usual this year.  Why should Inside Out 2 get the nom/win when the studio that funded and released the project was so crummy to their workers?

Okay, so what about The Wild Robot? It’s one of the year’s most acclaimed films, with many folks making a big rumble about wanting it to be nominated for Best Animated Feature and Best Picture. It also had one of the most acclaimed trailers seen for any film this year. It was a festival season darling, and it’s amazing how successful the film is, considering people did not see Dreamwork’s last non-franchise movie last year, Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken. Animation fans are finicky and not all that stellar at being consistent in their support for animation, but that’s another topic for another day. Why would The Wild Robot have any issues? It’s because shortly after the first trailer got released, and all of that hype and acclaim it got from early impressions, DreamWorks decided to lay off their US animation team to begin making contracts with outside the US vendors and studios to make their future animated film projects, because animation has become “too expensive” to make apparently. I mean, it’s amazing that slashing the higher-ups and CEOs’ paychecks is never up as an option, but that’s Hollywood for ya. Why would voters want to support a film made by a studio that has none of the folks who made it? 

You can argue its case isn’t as bad as the Inside Out 2/Pixar/Disney situation, but I wouldn’t. Both studios deserve a lot of disdain and criticism aimed at the higher-ups for making these decisions. In some regards, they should have their films disqualified because of the mistreatment of their workers. This is an ideal non-complicated solution to a very messy moment in time for the animation industry. Emotions are, understandably, at an all-time high with studios not wanting to greenlight anything unless it’s a safe bet. With award shows, it’s complicated because you should award the best movies and only think about what the best movies are. That’s a whole other mess to discuss whether award shows should award the most important movies of the year or the actual best movies barring any fancy FYC campaign that will manipulate the voters into voting for whoever. Plus, these movies should be nominated, because so many amazing folks put in the hard work and should be credited and cherished for their hours of painstaking animating and telling such amazing stories that shouldn’t be negated because a few bad eggs on top ruin everything for everyone else. 

The only real winners outside of these two are possibly Memoir of a Snail with its beautiful tragicomedy approach to a story of two siblings, and Flow with its gorgeous silent narrative of a group of animals on a fantastical journey. With their momentum picking up steam and both already winning major awards, they could dethrone both of the biggest fish in the pond. I would also nominate the action-packed Ghost in the Shell-style sci-fi adventure Mars Express, Aardman’s newest charming venture with Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, Naoko Yamada’s beautiful coming-of-age musical venture with The Colors Within, the Moebius and Ghibli-inspired Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds, and the visually stunning dramedy Chicken for Linda, but that’s just me. 

I wish there was a way to be happy about either one winning with the messiness being acknowledged. That won’t happen, but that means hoping that the award season and award shows are more than giving Hollywood a pat on the back. I wish there was a way for the workers to be happy about their film winning an award without the harsh reality of everything that goes on behind the scenes rearing its ugly head. To be clear, Chris Sanders, Kelsey Mann, and Pete Doctor are not to be held responsible for these layoffs/restructuring of production that were more from the higher-ups at both studios. A lot of the issues in this situation are due to labor exploitation from the people running the two monolithic studios. In the end, will any of this hurt either Inside Out 2 or The Wild Robot from winning awards? Maybe. It won’t cause them to drop out of the race or where we live in a world where neither film wins, but these elements alongside the frustration of the animation industry being stalled since the studios want cheap and quickly made nonsense put both films in a precarious position. As I said above, my fictional betting money is on The Wild Robot, but I’m always down for a surprise depending on who makes it to the final five nomination spots for Best Animated Feature.