It looks as though Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks will be facing off against each other in the animated Oscar category as “Toy Story 4,” “Frozen II” and “Abominable” are the current frontrunners to win the Oscar. This year we had a record 32 submissions for the category, not counting Jon Favreau's “The Lion King,” which seemed to be some sort of odd hybrid of photo-realism and CGI. However, I am ready to omit “The Angry Birds Movie 2,” “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part” and “The Secret Life of Pets 2,” all three made more than $200 million domestically, but the reviews weren’t very good and consensus seems to be that they just didn’t live up to expectations.
“Toy Story 4” is the no-brainer frontrunner. A 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an 84 Metascore. No other animated movie has come close to these numbers this year. Its $1 billion worldwide gross is also very helpful as chances are it will end up being the most viewed film in the animated category. This aligns well with past winners as, ever since its inception in 2002, 9 of the Animated Oscar’s 18 winners have been Pixar films.
With all that being said, it’s fair to say that this hasn’t been a very good year for mainstream animation. So much so that the top 3 contenders are all sequels. I narrowed down the list of 32 submissions to the nine most concrete and realistic contenders.
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
(1) “Toy Story 4” (2) “Frozen II” (3) “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World” (4) “Abominable” (5) “Missing Link” (6) “Weathering With You” (7) “I Lost My Body” (8) “Klaus” (9) “Bunuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles”
The short version: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film.