2016 Oscar Nominees for 'Best Animated Feature' Announced

The wait is over as the nominations for 2016 Academy Awards- better known as The Oscars- were revealed this morning in Hollywood. Our interest is obviously chiefly in the Best Animated Feature category, which this year comprises of five nominees. The nominations this year are a mix of the expected and a couple of wonderful surprises.

Going into this year's awards season we expected nominations for Inside Out, Anomalisa and Shaun The Sheep and that has indeed proved to be the case. So far, the nominees match up with those widely reflected elsewhere. The remaining two nominations are much more surprising, however, as GKIDS has amazingly repeated the impressive feat of scoring a double nomination for the third time. Seeing a Studio Ghibli film getting nominated isn't the biggest shocker in the world, but When Marnie Was There's nomination is still a bit unexpected. It's the first Ghibli film directed by anyone other than Miyazaki or Takahata to get a nod, for a start. The fact that it might well be the last chance to nominate Ghibli in the category probably didn't hurt.

The final slot goes to this year's 'little film that could' -and the second GKIDS released film in the batch- goes to Ale Abreu's Boy and The World.


We have to admit: this year's nominations are a pleasant surprise. We expected to see The Good Dinosaur and The Peanuts Movie competing, but we're delighted to see some smaller films there instead. No doubt there will be the usual gnashing of teeth from people outside the animation community lamenting that "films nobody has seen" are nominated over the more commercial likes of Minions and Peanuts, but it's always good for smaller films to get that extra publicity. It's also interesting that only one CG animated film makes the cut this year, with two stop-motion and two 2D animated films making up the rest of the category. Who says traditional animation's dead?

However, thanks to the lack or respect offered to animation by the wider Academy (i.e. outside the animation branch) Inside Out will likely win by default. At least this time around it actually deserves it. The Pixar film repeated its BAFTA result of also picking up a nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

The Best Animated Short category sees another Pixar nominee in Sanjay's Super Team, alongside Richard Williams and Imogen Sutton's Prologue, Don Hertzfeldt's World Of Tomorrow, We Can't Live Without Cosmos and Bear Story.

The 88th Academy Awards will take place February 28th, 2016.

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