Oscar Best Animated Films by Picture

IMO of the movies you mentioned:

1. Cars

2. Monster House

3. Flushed Away

4. Happy Feet

Cars wasn't nearly as bad as Happy Feet, though it was the worst thing Pixar had ever done (and would remain so up until Cars 2).

Well in my opinion Monsters inc is very slightly better than shrek, flushed away or hedge should've won in 2006, wreck-it ralph in 2012, wind rises in 2013, lego movie in 2014, anomalisa in 2015, and kubo in 2016

I think The Wind Rises might be my favourite Studio Ghibli film.

I hate The Wind Rises. It's so pretentious. Most people don't know about Princess Kaguya by Takahata, which came out the same year but was nominated for the Oscars a year later. That one was a real gem.

anyway, all that changed after The Lion King. Other studios saw dollar signs and all of a sudden Dreamworks and Fox had their very own animation departments and before long they were cooking up ways to try and steal some market share from Disney and Pixar. Antz was made as a rip-off of A Bug's Life, The Prince of Egypt was known at Dreamworks as "The Zion King," and these films were followed up by The Road to El Dorado, Ice Age and Shrek. Warner Bros tried to get in on the action as well I think their first offering was Quest for Camelot. They didn't do as well as Fox or Dreamworks. Anyway, before long there were a ton of animated movies coming out every year compared to the small handful we had (in the US) before the Lion King. We also saw more foreign animated movies released in the US after the in-roads made by Ghost in the Shell and Princess Mononoke, etc. This coupled with the fact that the Academy didn't want to repeat the '92 controversy led to the creation of the animated oscar.

The only other animated films to be nominated for Best Picture were Toy Story 3 and Up, and that was only after the field of nominated films was expanded to a maximum of 10. With 10 films nominated, it was safe to nominate animated films again (and other deserving movies like Inception that normally would have not been nominated) and people wouldn't get so upset about it. But, now that they have the Best Animated Picture category it's pretty safe to say that an animated film will never win Best Picture even if it deserves it. So it's a win/loss for animated films in general.

These comments are just the best. One point I'll take some umbrage to is that Antz was a rip-off of A Bug's Life. That's really oversimplifying the ongoing "war" between Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks. They have released very-similarly-premised movies within a year of each other at least half a dozen times since Katzenburg left Disney and formed DreamWorks. DreamWorks has more-often-than-not been first to the theaters and has certainly held their own in the "which one was better" race. A Bugs Life < Antz; The Wild < Madagascar; Finding Nemo > Shark Tale; Ratataouille > Flushed Away (not by a ton, though); and Monsters Inc. vs. Shrek is pretty much a draw. There was also Emperor's New Groove vs. Road to El Dorado, but they were both pretty bad.

I liked A Bug's Life much better than Antz, but.. The Wild? what is that? Hold on...

::google, google::

hm... how did I miss that? Doesn't look even vaguely familiar. I wasn't even living overseas in 2006. Must have blocked it out. But anyway that was Disney, not Pixar. And Disney movies of that era (mid-2000s were mostly pretty horrible)

Not sure "artistic merit" is the point of those films. It's to make kids laugh and then beg their parents to keep taking them to see it and buy the DVDs. They are spectacularly successful at that. You're certainly entitled to your opinion that they "blow", but my kids love the Madagascar movies.

Well, that's fine. Just don't expect them to win an Oscar. I was responding to a comment asking where Ice Age and Madagascar were on a quiz about animated films that have won Oscars.

Agreed that they are not oscar-worthy movies. But even with lots more animated films being made, anything by Dreamworks or Disney or Pixar will get a nomination.

Oh, yes, one has to be very "high-brow" to appreciate the historical dramas of Crash, Birdman, The Hurt Locker, Slumdog Millionaire, No Country for Old Men, The Departed, Million Dollar Baby, Chicago, Lord of the Rings...I will agree on one point, however. They do not reward comedies.

I agree with ander217. However, the Academy is heavily criticised, more than it should. In my opinion, they do reward, more often than not, the best in each category. Comedies are less universal than dramas and animated pictures. The culture differences play hugely on how these (comedies) movies are accepted.

Seems like the last 10-15 years have seen a huge swing from awarding blockbusters (understood as movies that lots and lots of people actually want to see) to more recently awarding films that are seen as more dramatic or artistic. I look at many of the films from my youth that won best picture and they were almost all hugely popular box office films. The last winner of best picture that I have actually seen is Argo, 10 years ago. Of course that's anecdotal, but it bears out when you look at the top grossing pictures from year to year. Today's nominees are rarely big hits.

Could not disagree more. Rango was a masterpiece. I'll give you that it is not terrifically well-suited to being a kid's movie, but out of this list it's top three for me. Great characters, great writing, and an important story to tell especially now as the American west parches, the Colorado River no longer runs to the sea, and developers and suburbanites continue to bury their heads in the sand (or, excuse me, their imported Scottish turf grass that they laid on top of the sand).

but Cars isn't like Toy Story or A Bug's Life or Finding Nemo- films where human beings exist in parallel. In the world of Cars every lifeform is some kind of car and there are no humans at all.

Your Name is a much better movie than Zootopia. If you haven't seen it, give it a chance.

Lmao I remember they made a movie for Ratchet and Clank a while ago