Last year's Best Animated Feature field was remarkably empty and 2018, at first glance, also doesn't look that promising. You can probably take it to the bank that Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs will be squaring off against the sequels to Wreck it Ralph and The Incredibles. And it shouldn't be THAT easy to know what's going to happen a full year in advance, should it?
Of course we don't know everything yet. It's tough to foresee which foreign entries will qualify, for example. 2018 seems bereft of an obvious non-American competitor (last year it was easy to see The Breadwinner coming, which is why we predicted it a year in advance). [Four questions and ways to improve the category after the jump...]
We're 17 years into the category and given the very very low threshold for triggering a set of five nominees, it's just not a regularly competitive category. In those 17 years only 3 of the competitive fields have felt like an actual race for the win (2012, 2014, and 2016) and not just one locked-up frontrunner with an underdog spoiler that is not really going to happen. Further adding to the rote feeling of the category is the sameness of winners. In the first seventeen years of the category only two features that were not American CGI adventure comedy types have won (Hayao Miyazaki's traditionally animated Spirited Away from Japan and Aardman animation's stop motion horror comedy Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit from the UK).
QUESTION 1: So what can be done to improve the category?
How about a larger pool of contenders to trigger a full category or nominating committees with executive interference as with Foreign Language Film? Currently it only requires 16 features to trigger a 5 nominee race. As we've stated before but feel we should keep repeating, if you use those percentages for its sibling category Best Picture, you'd have about 90 or so Best Picture nominees each year. Best Foreign Language Film usually has an eligible field that's 4 times the size of the Animated field and they're allowed only the same amount of nominees. So why do they make it so easy to be nominated for Animated Feature? Here at TFE we're always complaining that Makeup and Hair is a ghetto category that's only allowed 3 nominees (despite every other category getting three) when every single live action movie uses Makeup and Hair people but if there's a category out there that should only be allowed three nominees, isn't it Animated Feature given the shallow pool of possibilities?
This extended gag in the "Ralph Breaks the Internet" trailer really lands, doesn't it?
QUESTION #2: Do you think Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2 will do what other animated sequels couldn't and win the Oscar its predecessor lost? (Before you say Toy Story 3 please note that the category didn't exist when the first two Toy Story films were released.)
QUESTION #3: Do you think Incredibles 2 can do what no other animated sequels have done and win a follow-up Oscar for the same franchise? (Repeat: Before you say Toy Story 3 please note that the category didn't exist when the first two Toy Story films were released.)
QUESTION #4: Which animated film that's NOT a sequel are you most excited to see this year?
Channing Tatum stars as Migo in "Small Foot"
ANYWAY, PLEASE CHECK OUT THE NEW CHART. DID WE MISS ANYTHING?