This Might Be the Most Exciting Year for the Best Animated Feature Category at the Oscars

Ever. Photo: Universal Pictures

For all the Oscar buzz that tends to permeate the Toronto International Film Festival, you’ll rarely find yourself in heated conversation about the Best Animated Feature category. Disney and Pixar, the traditional behemoths of animation at the Oscars, tend not to do the festival thing, which leaves the animated offerings at Venice, Toronto, Telluride, and New York feeling like also-rans. Even last year, when the eventual Oscar winner — Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron — served as the TIFF opening-night gala, there wasn’t much chatter about the Oscar horserace. Mostly because there wasn’t much of one. Miyazaki’s movie would go on to trump the well-reviewed but slightly unsatisfying Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and that was that.

This year won’t be so cut and dried. TIFF currently finds itself at ground zero for what is shaping up to be the most exciting year for the Best Animated Feature category at the Oscars… ever? Sunday’s world premiere of DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot sets up a clash with Pixar’s Inside Out 2, the presumed frontrunner ever since its $300 million opening weekend. It’s a battle where both movies are getting Oscar buzz not just for the animation category but in Best Picture as well. And it’s not just the presence of these two movies that could make this year’s Best Animated Feature category an all-timer. Two other TIFF screenings — a Latvian animal adventure and a documentary animated with Legos — highlight a deep bench for animation this year, one that starts in Toronto but stretches far into the rest of the 2024 film calendar.

The Wild Robot comes from director Chris Sanders, who directed the closest thing Disney’s roster of animated classics has to a cult film, Lilo & Stitch, and later helmed DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon, a movie that would have probably won the Oscar if it didn’t have the misfortune of premiering the same year as Toy Story 3r. His new film concerns a robot (voiced by Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o) who gets shipwrecked on an island inhabited by woodland creatures. The film has been accumulating buzz ever since Universal screened footage at CinemaCon in April, with some of the rosiest outlooks predicting a run at a Best Picture nomination.

While Best Picture talk for The Wild Robot might be putting the cart before the horse — the movie will have to prove itself a hit with the public before that’s even a consideration — it’s not the only animated feature attracting that kind of buzz this year. Inside Out 2 is currently being predicted as a Best Picture nominee by four of the awards experts on Gold Derby after having set a $1.6 billion box-office record for animated films. Given how bleak things looked for animated tentpoles last year, with flops like Disney’s Elemental and Wish, it’s not surprising that Inside Out 2 is getting a lot of the “thank God you saved cinema!” praise that Top Gun: Maverick (a Best Picture nominee) got two years ago. No two animated features have ever been rumored Best Picture contenders in the same year, but there’s a first for everything.

Besides The Wild Robot, two other animated features screening at TIFF could easily find themselves in awards contention. One is Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow. It’s a dialogue-free movie about a determined little cat who survives a possibly-apocalyptic flood and must band together with a dog, a capybara, a lemur, and a cane-type bird to survive. It’s also the Latvian entry for the Best International Feature Oscar, so it’ll have a few avenues towards a nomination. It plays like The Land Before Time meets The Impossible, and Zilbalodis deploys a ton of ambiguity with regards to time and place, keeping the viewer on their toes. It’s a high-art film with a fairly simple message of cross-cultural cooperation that, because it’s dialogue free, never feels cloying.

Meanwhile, documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville’s Pharrell Williams biography Piece by Piece is animated Lego Movie style, which is just the kind of “wait, what?” concept that could draw awards voters into its orbit. Neville is an Oscar winner (for 2013’s 20 Feet from Stardom) and Williams is a two-time nominee (for the song “Happy” from Despicable Me 2 and for being a producer on Hidden Figures, and if that is not the perfect Oscar Trivia question, I don’t know what is), so the pedigree is there.

Once the Oscar race moves beyond Toronto, it’s only going to get more competitive, starting with a little movie called Moana 2. The original Moana made upwards of $600 million globally, and with the sequel releasing Thanksgiving weekend, its massive box-office potential could buoy it into the Animated Feature category. Box-office is not always the determining factor at the Oscars, but as with Inside Out 2, Hollywood will be in a particular mood to celebrate Disney returning to blockbuster status.

In December,  even more Oscar-pedigreed animation will hit big and small screens. Four-time Oscar winner Nick Park returns with another Wallace & Gromit feature, 19 years after the stop-motion inventor-and-dog pair’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit won Best Animated Feature. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl drops on Netflix on Christmas Day. And few film franchises have been as dominant at the Oscars as The Lord of the Rings, which is why I will be paying attention when Warner Bros. releases director Kenji Kamiyama’s The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an anime prequel set before Peter Jackson’s trilogy. Featuring the voices of Brian Cox and Miranda Otto (the latter reprising her role as Éowyn from the Jackson films), The War of the Rohirrim is set to release in theaters on December 13.

We’re already at seven major animated contenders for Best Animated Feature, all of which could have been considered frontrunners in a vacuum. And that’s not even considering potential dark horse movies releasing later this year like Memoir of a Snail, from Australian animator Adam Elliot, whose short film Harvie Krumpet won the Animated Short Oscar in 2003.  The anime film The Colors Within is also worth keeping an eye on; it’s being distributed by GKIDS, which has placed nine Best Animated Feature nominees in the last ten years, including The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Wolfwalkers, and last year’s winner, The Boy and the Heron.

TIFF long ago earned their reputation as the festival where Oscar winners like American Beauty, Whale Rider, and Silver Linings Playbook were launched. Back-to-back years launching Oscar-winner The Boy and the Heron and Oscar-hopeful The Wild Robot, however, could go a long way towards making this a major launchpad for animated films looking to challenge Disney and Pixar.