When it comes to Best Animated Feature Oscars, Pixar leads every other studio by far with 11 wins and 18 nominations. The closest studio is Disney with only four victories, leading a handful of studios that have won multiple Oscars.
But it’s been a rough stretch for Pixar recently—the studio hasn’t won the award since Soul claimed the trophy in 2020. They didn’t even have a nomination in 2022 after Lightyear failed to impress critics or audiences. However, the immense critical and box office success of Inside Out 2, and the lack of realistic competition, appears to have put this year’s competition to bed early.
For years, the Academy almost defaulted to picking the Pixar nominee, even in controversial decisions such as Brave beating out options like Wreck-It-Ralph. And recently, there have been questions about how seriously the Academy even takes animated films, sometimes picking lesser Pixar or Disney flicks over foreign or more mature animated films.
But the past two years have seen a change with Oscar voters choosing Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron even over Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion Pinocchio over Pixar’s Turning Red and DreamWork’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.
There are only a handful of serious challengers left out there. The Despicable Me franchise hasn’t gotten a nomination since Despicable Me 2, so there’s no reason to believe Academy voters will let an inferior sequel in.
Moana 2 is an odd case in that Disney originally developed it as a series to bolster Disney+, but changed course to release it as a theatrical film. That doesn’t exactly instill confidence. Hopefully, the decision stems from the quality of the story and work, rather than the realization that a Moana sequel would make the Mouse a lot more money than a free streaming series. But Academy voters will likely nominate the film regardless unless it truly sinks, with little completion on the horizon and the Disney name behind it.
The Wild Robot might be the major challenger remaining for Inside Out 2, as it seems to have an artistic touch that could elevate it above more standard fare. DreamWorks is actually the second-most nominated studio with 14 nominations in the history of the award—but has only actually won it twice. Even that stat has caveats: Shrek won the very first iteration of the award. The other DreamWorks win is Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Wererabbit, which is more of an Aardman film than a Dreamworks picture.
Speaking of Wallace and Gromit, the sequel to that Oscar winner is currently set for a Christmas debut. A Vengeance Most Fowl could be another challenger if it can recapture the magic of the original.
The other competition is Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim, which could find a path similar to Into the Spider-Verse with a 2D anime style and potentially more mature subject matter. Obviously, the original Lord of the Rings trilogy was an Oscar juggernaut, but it’s unclear how that might transfer to an animated spinoff. The Hobbit series certainly didn’t find the same awards success as the original trilogy, so it’s hard to judge without much yet to look at. While Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron are technically Oscar-winning anime films, they aren’t in the style of Rohirrim. Time will tell.
