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7 Reasons the Oscars Ignored Your Favorite Animated Movie
7 Reasons the Oscars Ignored Your Favorite Animated Movie,The Best Animation Feature at the Oscar has been dominated over the decades by Disney and Pixar, while films that cater to adults or come from abroad have had an uphill climb.

7 Reasons the Oscars Ignored Your Favorite Animated Movie

The Academy Awards existed more than seven decades before animated movies finally got their due. The addition of the Best Animated Feature category in 2001, you’d think, would’ve opened doors for the Oscars to celebrate and honor animation of all kinds — different genres, different techniques, and hailing from different countries. That’s not what the past 21 years of Oscars have borne out, though.

With very few exceptions, the category has been a boon for the Disneys and DreamWorks of the world, leaving the rest of the animation world struggling to get past the “happy to be nominated” stage. There’s no one reason that explains why the Academy ignores so many types of animated movies, but a look back at the past 22 years of nominations reveals a few trends that explain the Oscars’ limited slate of animated movies, year after year.

The Rules Limit the Number of Nominees







Photo: Tippett Studios

Just kidding. Even in our most optimistic hopes for what the Academy could be, there’s no chance that it would ever nominate something as singular, bizarre, gonzo, and scatalogical as Phil Tippett’s magnum opus from last year. Mad God is more an experimental art film than crowd-pleaser, which is only to Tippett’s credit. It’s an ambitious, narratively oblique, stop-motion descent into a hell that looks like a grim menagerie of the grotesque and took Tippett three decades to make independently, far, far away from any studio or meddling producers. Obviously, it rules, and it’s for those reasons and more that it was never going to have a shot at an Oscar. But, oh, what if it could’ve?

Mad God’s snub underscores how difficult it is for unconventional, cult-oriented, or genre films — animated or not — to get any kind of award notice. But maybe one day the Academy will surprise us — if not with a Mad God, then at least with something outside its normal definition of what praiseworthy animation looks like.

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