Warming up for the Oscars

With the recent news that the Visual Effect contenders for Academy Award nominations have been trimmed from 20 films down to ten, it makes sense to look at the Animation category...


Like most things, it helps to start by reading the rules. Key takeaways from Rule Seven are:

• 40 minutes or more running time.
• Frame-by-frame technique.
• Significant number of major characters must be animated.
• Animation must figure in no less than 75% of the picture's running time.

And, at least eight eligible features must have been released theatrically in Los Angeles County within the calendar year.

This year the Motion Picture Academy is considering a record 26 animated features for nomination.

Before the animation rennaissance in America you were lucky to get two or three releases, the Disney film, and one other. For instance, in 1977 There was Disney's The Rescuers, Richard Williams' Raggedy Ann and Andy, a Musical Adventure, Rankin & Bass The Hobbit, and a compilation film of the Winnie the Pooh shorts, the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. And that was considered a good year. When the Academy considered finally creating a category for animated feature, it was with the understanding that is there were not at least 6 releases, we wouldn't have a category that year. (VFX had the same stipulation. Never fear, since 2001 animation has never gone under that number. For the last ten years we've never been less than 16 releases, from all over the world.

-- from President Emeritus Tom Sito

Good times indeed for theatrical feature animation. So the question is, which category(ies) does The Jungle Book belong to?