Boy, the animation race sure has changed since I made my way-too-early predictions back in March.
The biggest change is Laika pushing Wildwood to 2026, a film that I, along with many others, considered the frontrunner in the race. And then Cannes rolled around, and The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol (now renamed simply A Magnificent Life) got underwhelming reviews despite Sylvain Chomet being an Oscar darling in the past.
I thought Looney Tunes might compete, but it turns out that it was eligible last year. And what about Andy Serkis’ Animal Farm film? Oh, it substitutes politics for poop jokes.
So what the hell can we expect in this race at this point?
Well, the brightest spot right now has to be Arco, which already got a lot of buzz at the Cannes Film Festival and just last week claimed the top prize at the Annecy Film Festival, the premier festival for animated movies.
The French film produced by Natalie Portman imagines a world in which rainbows are time travelers traveling across the sky, and the titular Arco is one such 10-year-old time traveler who crash lands from the year 3000 into our near future.
At this point in the race, it seems like this attention should be enough to notch it a nomination, if it never really challenges for the top prize.
I am also going on the record to predict Netflix will realize the state of the race and begin championing Lost in Starlight, its first-ever Korean-language animated film that it spent $70 million to make before unceremoniously dumping it on the streaming service.
But the people who have seen it largely love it, matching Arco‘s 3.8 Letterboxd rating with a far bigger pool of viewers so far. In addition to the quality of the film, this is simply a studio power prediction. If Netflix pushes it, there’s not much that could stand in its way. At least that way Netflix would get some return for its investment.
There’s been a lot of talk about who is the frontrunner in this race, with people loath to predict Zootopia 2, as the only franchise to ever have a sequel win Best Animated Feature is Toy Story, with both the third and fourth installments claiming the award.
I think that’s overblown though. There have been plenty of years in which a sequel had a great shot at winning and simply lost out to better or equal competition—we were all shocked when Across the Spider-Verse lost to The Boy and the Heron.
It’s worth noting that this prize has only been given out for about 20 years, so those two Toy Story wins account for about 10 percent of the award’s history.
The key is in studio power. There have traditionally been three major studios vying for this award: Pixar, Disney, and DreamWorks. Pixar is the undisputed champ with 11 wins—that’s half of all the awards ever. But Disney and DreamWorks aren’t far behind in terms of nominations. DreamWorks has no viable projects this year to compete with.
The Academy has shown a desire to honor films outside the box these past three years, especially with its decision to pick Flow last year. But I don’t get the feeling that Arco is quite on that level. We seem bound to fall into a race between Zootopia 2 and Elio.
Now, if Elio turns out to be great when it releases later this week, we can probably put a bow on this race. But if it underwhelms like many people expect it to, it’s hard not to put your money on Zootopia, since the first movie won this award and the premise opens itself up to sequel installments.
That’s all for this Poll Position. Until next time, screenagers.
