26 Animated Features Submitted For 2017 Oscar Race

Twenty-six animated features have been submitted for consideration in the Animated Feature Film category of the 90th Academy Awards, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today.

In nine out of the last ten years, the Academy has rubber stamped a Walt Disney Company-produced animated feature as the category’s winner, representing a near-unprecedented streak for a single company’s domination of an Oscar category and raising questions about the legitimacy of the category.

This year’s submitted films, in alphabetical order, are:

The Big Bad Fox & Other Tales
Birdboy: The Forgotten Children
The Boss Baby
The Breadwinner
Captain Underpants The First Epic Movie
Cars 3
Cinderella the Cat
Coco
Despicable Me 3
The Emoji Movie
Ethel & Ernest
Ferdinand
The Girl without Hands
In This Corner of the World
The Lego Batman Movie
The Lego Ninjago Movie
Loving Vincent
Mary and the Witch’s Flower
Moomins and the Winter Wonderland
My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea
Napping Princess
A Silent Voice
Smurfs: The Lost Village
The Star
Sword Art Online: The Movie – Ordinal Scale
Window Horses: The Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming

The Academy points out that even though the films have been submitted doesn’t mean they’ve all qualified yet:

Several of the films have not yet had their required Los Angeles qualifying run. Submitted features must fulfill the theatrical release requirements and comply with all of the category’s other qualifying rules before they can advance in the voting process.

Sixteen or more films must qualify for the maximum of five nominees to be voted, which will certainly happen this year.

There is one less film this year than last year’s record-breaking 27 animated feature submissions. The category could have been bigger, and some films that we had anticipated would be submitted were not, among them, Big Fish & Begonia, Have A Nice Day, and Tehran Taboo.

Of the submissions, eleven of the films were produced by major Hollywood studios and fifteen were produced by independent and/or foreign companies.

The Academy has changed the voting process this year, opening up nominations voting in the category to its entire eligible voting membership. The controversial move is widely perceived within the animation community as a way to diminish the influence of the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch (which has exhibited a strong tendency to nominate artistic and challenging films), by adding in more Academy members from other branches, who have a bias towards recognizing mainstream Hollywood productions.