Would Toy Story Have Always Had a Friend in Oscar?

Out of the 30 years this franchise has been around, Toy Story is one of the most popular and important animated franchises in the history of film and animation, and I’m not making this observation based on my being a fan of the franchise or studio. Not only do you have the franchise that kicked off the big CGI animation boom among many other advancements in animation and tech; you also have one of the rare occurrences with Toy Story 3 in 2010 taking home the Best Animated Feature Oscar, and also being nominated for Best Picture, one of three animated films to do so alongside Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Pixar’s UP. Whatever you have to say now about the franchise and its most recent installment, it’s a very important part of history that was able to tell deeply personal stories of being forgotten, replaced, dealing with abandonment, and finally moving on in life after a certain period of your life is over. Now, while I was doing research about how to talk about this year’s potential awards nominees in the realm of animation, a small detail about the franchise caught my eye. Although a lot of people like to talk about their disdain for the fact Pixar and or Disney win so many of the Best Animated Feature Oscars, only two of the five movies have won it. 

That’s because the Best Animated Feature Oscar was only founded in 2001. This late timeline was mostly because by that year , there were more studios than just Disney producing animated features. Well, how true is that statement? It’s not as if any other studios ever existed. By the time the original Toy Story came out, there were many studios from all over the world to consider, but that’s also taking into account how the US film scene treated foreign animated films and how, from the US perspective, other studios were trying to capture that Disney 90s era zeitgeist. Disney at the time, whether you wanted to admit it or not, was the only game in town. So let’s rewind the clock, going back 21 years all the way to 1995, and pretend that the Oscars were taking animation more seriously than they were now and were willing to have Best Animated Feature around the time Toy Story and Toy Story 2 were around. 

Let’s start with 1995, an overall weird year for animation. On one hand, you have Pocahontas, whose critical failure caused a snowball effect for Disney’s downfall in the latter half of the 90s, but, on the other hand, you have Pixar’s rise to fame with Toy Story. This same year we got the cult-favorite, dog-sledding movie Balto, the fan-favorite A Goofy Movie, the highly-acclaimed, Mamoru Oshii-directed, Ghost in the Shell, and the director of Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo’s anthology film Memories. We also got the wonderfully animated, but forgettable Don Bluth feature, The Pebble and the Penguin, the Yoshifumi Kondo masterpiece that was written by Hayao Miyazaki, Whisper of the Heart, and of all things to get in 1995, The Gumby Movie. These movies would have possibly been nominated for the Best Animated Feature award, if it existed in 1995. Well, A Goofy Movie flopped back then so we can rule that one out. Same with The Pebble and the Penguin due to its lackluster quality and box office failure. Balto was another film that died at the box office while getting mixed reviews. And who would care about Gumby at this point in 1995? That leaves us with Whisper of the Heart, Ghost in the Shell, Memories, and Toy Story. While these movies are all fantastic , and Ghost in the Shell is another very important part of animation history, I still think that Toy Story would have won due to it’s having made more of a cultural impact which, sadly, would have overshadowed Ghost in the Shell due to how anime still lacked popularity in the US back then. Ghibli also wasn’t as popular in the states at this point, so Whisper of the Heart wouldn’t have been nominated . Memories is really good, but I could have seen the distributor or studio behind the anthology film to consider a different approach by splitting up the shorts as their own thing for Best Animated Short like they did with Otomo’s 2014 anthology film Short Piece, where they took the short Possessions and submitted it for Best Animated Short. 

Now with Toy Story 2, which was released in 1999, we have some hefty competition, with Disney having both Tarzan and Fantasia 2000, Brad Bird having The Iron Giant with Warner Bros., and the sci-fi political drama, directed by Hiroyuki Okiura and written by Mamoru Oshii, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. There is also the Richard Rich directed adaptation of The King and I, the Isao Takahata directed My Neighbors the Yamadas, Jean-Francois Laguionie’s A Monkey’s Tale, the fan favorite Adolescence of Utena, and South Park Bigger Longer, and Uncut. If I could once again put myself into the mindset of the voters, with regards to what they would actually choose to nominate, they would instantly remove The King and I due to its lackluster reception, being seen as a weirdly cheap-feeling Disnified adaptation of a well known musical. French animation wasn’t nearly as beloved here stateside, so A Monkey’s Tale would have been cut. Even though My Neighbors the Yamadas is a truly charming little slice-of-life film from one of the great masters of Japanese animation, once again Ghibli was still waiting for that first huge breakout hit, and thus, for voters, it would have flown under the radar. If it were the voting body of today, I could see South Park getting nominated, but, back then, it wouldn’t have made it through.

Despite being some of the most iconic animated features from Japan during the 90s, Adolescence of Utena and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade would have had a hard time getting nominated , but, if one had more of a chance than others, the nomination would go to Jin-Roh because of its more outwardly grounded and adult subject matter and visual style.  Between Disney’s two films, Tarzan would have gotten that third nomination due to its immense popularity and being the final swansong of the Disney 90s era. Not that Fantasia 2000 doesn’t have its moments, but due to the more tepid positive reviews and the middling box office performance, why would you choose that one compared to the one with banger Phil Collins songs like “Son of Man” and “Strangers Like Me?” The Iron Giant is a tough call, because while it was and has been met with nothing but critical acclaim, the film did flop due to outside forces out of the film’s control with Warner Bros. at the time pulling back support and marketing for their animated features due to their failures at the box office. If we had to choose among Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, Tarzan, The Iron Giant, and Toy Story 2 winning Best Animated Feature, it’s hard to believe that any other film other than Toy Story 2 would have won. It’s not that there weren’t other great animated films during this year, as there are always a slew of great movies every year, but people forget how gigantic the franchise, and how important its history, was for its release. Given how Toy Story 2 almost never happened due to losing the work done on it when an animator accidentally deleted a majority of the finished work for the film, its being Pixar’s first sequel, and its resulting critical acclaim, why would any of the other films win over it?

You can decry how this argument comes off as pro-Pixar propaganda , but it really isn’t. If you go back to the original reason for the founding of the Best Animated Feature, it was because there weren’t enough working animation studios to make it worthwhile until the emergence of DreamWorks, Blue Sky, and Illumination during the three or so decades this category has existed. It would have been pretty much Disney fighting itself a lot of the time, because other studios in the US weren’t making great films, or were sabotaging their own films to try to make them similar to Disney’s big musicals at the time. Sadly, it feels like that now, since most studios either belong to Universal or Disney. Sure we have, presently, other emerging studios, like Netflix and Laika, and a heavily increased interest in nominating foreign/indie features, but, back then, with the voting body and historical context of theatrical animation, it was sadly going to be Disney and/or Pixar.

Maybe ‘98 could have given DreamWorks a win with The Prince of Egypt, but we wouldn’t truly know unless we could have talked with the voters of the mid to late 90s about what film that they would have chosen. The award still would have probably gone to Pixar or Disney, at the time, because of a lack of interest in foreign features and an absence of real competition. Now, whether or not the Best Animated Feature is a worthwhile category, since there has been some discussion about it being better that there isn’t a category, well, we can discuss that issue another time. Will Toy Story 5 therefore have a chance of winning this year? It depends, due to how much of a bloodbath it could be between the major studios and their foreign/indie counterparts. At the very least, Toy Story 5 could get nominated, but winning is a totally different issue. It would depend on if the film could keep its momentum. After all, since 2022, Disney/Pixar have been losing the award due to the voting body being way more open to properly awarding other animated features that aren’t from this studio. Thus, when you look past your subjective taste or feeling about a studio or movie and look at the bigger picture,sometimes, the winners are easy to spot.