Twenty-six films have been entered in the Oscars race for Best Animated Feature, more than enough to give the category a full slate of five nominees.
The films include Pixar’s “Coco,” which must be considered the closest thing to a front runner at this point; two Lego movies, “The Lego Batman Movie” and “The Lego Ninjago Movie;” DreamWorks Animation’s “The Boss Baby” and “Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie;” the sequels “Despicable Me 3,” “Cars 3” and “Smurfs: The Lost Village;” and a large number of indie productions, including “The Breadwinner,” “In This Corner of the World,” “Loving Vincent” and “The Big Bad Fox & Other Tales.”
If fewer than 16 films had been submitted, the category could have been downsized to three or four nominees.
For the first time, nomination voting in the category will be open to all Academy members rather than a select group made up largely of animators, provided they see most of the qualifying films.
In the past, the nominating members were thought to be enamored of hand-drawn animation and resistant to CG work, leading to the nomination of a large number of small European and Japanese films.
This year’s vote will be a test of whether opening the vote to the entire membership will tip the scales in favor of big-studio animated fare, though this is not a year in which the major animation studios have produced a particularly strong slate.
Not all of the films have completed their Oscar-qualifying runs, and the Academy’s Short Films and Feature Animation Branch has yet to complete its vetting of all the submitted films. But disqualifications at this stage are unlikely.
Oscars nominations will be announced on January 23.
The list of films:
“The Big Bad Fox & Other Tales”
“Birdboy: The Forgotten Children”
“The Boss Baby”
“The Breadwinner”
“Captain Underpants The First Epic Movie”
“Cars 3”
“Cinderella the Cat”
“Coco”
“Despicable Me 3”
“The Emoji Movie”
“Ethel & Ernest”
“Ferdinand”
“The Girl without Hands”
“In This Corner of the World”
“The Lego Batman Movie”
“The Lego Ninjago Movie”
“Loving Vincent”
“Mary and the Witch’s Flower”
“Moomins and the Winter Wonderland”
“My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea”
“Napping Princess”
“A Silent Voice”
“Smurfs: The Lost Village”
“The Star”
“Sword Art Online: The Movie – Ordinal Scale”
“Window Horses The Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming”