The 2023 Academy Awards' Best Animated Feature category is a testament to the diverse and dynamic world of animation, with a range of styles and techniques that challenge the traditional dominance of photorealistic CGI. This year's race is a showcase of innovation, creativity, and a shift towards more diverse storytelling and visual styles.
At one end of the spectrum, we have the studio behemoths, the glossy, four-quadrant CGI machines that have long dominated the field. However, even these major players are facing challenges. Pixar's 'Elio' failed to resonate with audiences, despite the studio's trademark polish. Similarly, Disney Animation's 'Zootopia 2', a sequel to the 2016 Oscar-winning billion-dollar hit, has received mixed reviews, with some critics questioning its appeal.
In contrast, Netflix is making waves with 'In Your Dreams', a Pixar-style CGI feature that blends Hollywood-style CGI with Korean mythology and story beats. The streamer's true awards frontrunner, however, is 'KPop Demon Hunters', a unique blend of Hollywood-CGI with Korean mythology and story beats. This film, directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, is a come-from-nowhere sensation and Netflix's first bona fide box-office hit, leading a wave of anime-driven contenders that signal a shift from cult TV fandom to mainstream moviegoing.
'Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle' and 'Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc' further showcase this shift, with their hybrid 2D/3D approaches that pair traditional character animation with digitally generated environments. These Japanese titles are also hyper-violent, R-rated features aimed squarely at adults, a stark contrast to the PG-friendly lane that defined most animation winners in the past.
Across Europe, hand-drawn animation continues to hold its ground, with French filmmakers pushing against the standardized CG look. 'Arco', a debut feature from French illustrator Ugo Bienvenu, uses a clean, graphic 2D style inspired by Studio Ghibli, bande dessinée comics, and 1970s pulp animation. 'Little Amélie or the Character of Rain', from Liane-Cho Han and Maïlys Vallade, takes a more impressionistic approach, using hand-drawn compositions to evoke a child's-eye view of the natural world.
Sylvain Chomet's 'A Magnificent Life', a Sony Pictures Classics contender about French writer-filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, offers another variation on artisanal European draftsmanship, intimate in scale, and pointedly unbothered by the horsepower of CG rendering. Chomet's work, he says, hasn't changed much from what Walt Disney was doing in the 1950s, emphasizing the enduring power of traditional animation techniques.
Commercially, the rise of non-U.S. animation has redrawn the field. 'Demon Slayer' and 'Ne Zha 2' were, pre-Zootopia 2, the two most successful animated films of the year, reinforcing how global fan cultures and regional styles are reshaping what animated blockbusters can look like.
Despite the dominance of 3D CGI at the Oscars, with two-thirds of all winners being studio-style photorealistic CGI, the Academy's preferences are shifting. The past three winners, Guillermo del Toro's stop-motion 'Pinocchio', Hayao Miyazaki's hand-drawn 'The Boy and the Heron', and Gints Zilbalodis' 'Flow', a 3D feature created with open-source software, suggest an Academy increasingly open to innovation, and an awards race no longer defined by any one aesthetic.
