Academy Announces 2023 Animation And VFX Oscar Nominees

The nominations for the 95th annual Academy Awards were announced today, and all the favorites are present and accounted for.

The 2023 animated feature category has felt mostly like a formality for the last several months, as it has long been assumed by awards experts and predictors that four of the now-nominated films were always likely to be picked: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (directed by del Toro and Mark Gustafson), Domee Shi’sTurning Red, Dean Fleischer Camp’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, and Joel Crawford’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. The fifth spot, however, was the source of much debate and speculation, and eventually went to Chris Williams’ The Sea Beast.

Several other major awards groups had previously nominated Pinocchio for score, song, and even production design, but the Oscars only picked it for the animated feature category, making it feel perhaps like the closest thing to a snub among this year’s animated entries.

The best animated short category was a much tougher field to predict ahead of today’s announcement. Perhaps the category’s only previous Oscar nominees Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby’s The Flying Sailor looked like a likely inclusion, but most of the commercialized big studio fare that has recently flooded the category was absent when the shortlist was announced.

That said, three of the five nominees picked from that 15-title shortlist did have backing from major media organizations including The Walt Disney Company (Sara Gunnarsdóttir and Pamela Ribon’s My Year of Dicks), Apple TV+ (Charlie Mackesy and Matthew Freud’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse), and the government-run National Film Board of Canada (The Flying Sailor).

Filling out the animated short category were the Cannes-playing Portuguese film Ice Merchants by João Gonzalez and Student Oscar-winner An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It from Australian filmmaker Lachlan Pendragon.

The visual effects category feels mostly academic this year, as Avatar: The Way of Water looks like an absolute lock to take home the Oscar. The film includes so much cg work that it could probably have qualified as an animated feature had it been submitted in the category. Other nominees in the category include All Quiet on the Western Front, The Batman, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Top Gun: Maverick.

Here are the Oscar categories which featured animated nominees:

Animated Feature

• Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
  Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson, Gary Ungar, Alex Bulkley
• Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
  Dean Fleischer Camp, Elisabeth Holm, Andrew Goldman, Carline Kaplan, Paul Mezey
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
  Joel Crawford, Mark Swift
• The Sea Beast
  Chris Williams, Jed Schlanger
• Turning Red
  Domee Shi, Lindsey Collins

Animated Short Film

• The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse
  Charlie Mackesy, Matthew Freud
• The Flying Sailor
  Amanda Forbis, Wendy Tilby
• Ice Merchants
  João Gonzalez
• An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It
  Lachlan Pendragon
• My Year of Dicks
  Sara Gunnarsdóttir, Pamela Ribon

Visual Effects

• All Quiet on the western Front
  Frank Petzold, Viktor
• Avatar: The Way of Water
  Joe Letteri, Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon, Daniel Barrett
• The Batman
  Dan Lemmon, Russel Earl, Anders Langlands, Dominic Tuohy
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
  Geoffrey Baumann, Craig Hammack, R. Christopher White, Dan Sudick
• Top Gun: Maverick
  Ryan Tudhope, Seth Hill, Bryan Litson, Scott R. Fischer

The 95th Academy Awards will take place on Sunday, March 12, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California.