Academy Award for Best Animated Feature

• 1. Introduction

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  Shrek took home the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature on the 24th of March, 2002. The category had never existed before that night, even though animation had been a fixture in cinema for most of the twentieth century. Before that evening, only one animated film had ever been nominated for Best Picture: Beauty and the Beast, in 1991. Why did the Academy resist a dedicated animation award for so long? And once it existed, which studios, filmmakers, and unlikely outsiders would leave their mark on it?

• 2. A Long Time Coming

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  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs received an Academy Honorary Award in 1938. There was no dedicated category for animated films. The Academy had concluded that too few were produced each year to justify one. When exceptional work appeared, the institution handed out one-off prizes. Who Framed Roger Rabbit earned a Special Achievement Academy Award in 1989 for its blend of live action and animation. Toy Story received the same recognition in 1996. All three went to Walt Disney Pictures.

  Former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg founded DreamWorks Animation, creating a sustained rival in the feature animation market. By 2001, the annual volume of significant animated releases had grown enough for the Academy to act. The Academy also built in a safeguard. The award would not be presented in any year when fewer than eight eligible films had opened in theaters.

• 3. Defining Animation

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  Dean Fleischer Camp and studio A24 submitted formal documentation to the Academy for the 95th Academy Awards. They needed to prove Marcel the Shell with Shoes On crossed the minimum animation threshold. The film used stop-motion animation but incorporated live-action elements, raising the question of whether at least 75 percent of its running time was animated. Every qualifying film must meet that threshold, run longer than 40 minutes, and use a frame-by-frame technique for its characters' performances. The Academy ruled in the film's favor, and Marcel the Shell received a nomination.

  Robert Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol and Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin had earlier pushed the Academy to define its stance on motion capture. The resulting rule was plain: motion capture alone does not constitute animation. Any film relying solely on it risked ineligibility. Only three films have been disqualified for failing to meet the 75 percent threshold. All of them were live-action and animation hybrids.

• 4. Studio Dominance

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  Pixar Animation Studios holds eleven wins in the Best Animated Feature category, more than any other studio, along with a record twenty total nominations. Between 2007 and 2010, Pixar claimed four consecutive wins, a streak no other studio has equaled. Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios are both owned by the Walt Disney Company. Together, the two studios give the parent company a combined total of fifteen wins.

  DreamWorks Animation has two wins to its name. Since its most recent victory, ten more of its films have been nominated without adding another. Studio Ghibli of Japan has earned seven nominations and two wins, the most of any non-American studio. Laika, the American stop-motion studio, has six nominations and no wins, the most of any studio without a victory. Only in 2005 and 2011 did a year pass without a Disney or Pixar film among the nominees.

• 5. The People

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  Pete Docter holds the most individual wins in the category's history, with three. He is tied for the most nominations overall, at four, alongside Hayao Miyazaki and Chris Sanders. Miyazaki holds the same records among filmmakers based outside the United States. He also became the oldest person ever to win the award, at the age of 83.

  Brenda Chapman became the first woman to win the award, for Brave. Peter Ramsey became the first Black director to win, for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Chris Sanders has directed four nominated films: Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon, The Croods, and The Wild Robot. None of them won, giving Sanders the most nominations of any individual without a victory.

• 6. The Independent Wave

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  Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio won in 2022, beginning a four-year stretch in which a non-Disney/Pixar film took the award each year. The Boy and the Heron followed in 2023, then Flow in 2024, then KPop Demon Hunters in 2025. Before that streak began, only six non-Disney/Pixar films had ever won. Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron are the only two non-English language films to have won in the category.

  Flow, produced in Latvia, was the first independent film to win Best Animated Feature. At 84 minutes, it is the shortest winner in the category's history; Spirited Away, at 125 minutes, is the longest. Flow's budget was in the seven-figure range, the smallest of any winner. After the ceremony, Flow's Oscar statuette went on display at the Latvian National Museum of Art. It was joined by the film's Golden Globe and European Film Award, and the display ran for a week.

  KPop Demon Hunters, directed by Maggie Kang, brought two firsts to the category. Kang became the first Korean director to win, and the film became the first non-Disney/Pixar production to win two Academy Awards. Matiss Kaza, one of Flow's directors, became the youngest winner in the category at 29. Flee, a Danish animated documentary, became the first of its kind to earn a nomination. Since 2019, at least one streaming-released film has appeared among the nominees every year.