Animation & VFX Nominations Revealed for the 95th Academy Awards

This morning, the nominations for the 95^th Academy Awards were announced at 5:30 in 24 categories. Here are this year’s animation and vfx-related nominees:

Best Animated Feature:

• Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (Directed by del Toro, Mark Gustafson) Netflix
• Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Dir: Dean Fleischer Camp) A24
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (Dir: Joel Crawford) DreamWorks/Universal
• The Sea Bast (Dir: Chris Williams) Netflix
• Turning Red (Dir: Domee Shi) Disney/Pixar

Best Animated Short:

• The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (Peter Baynton, Charlie Mackesy U.S.)
• The Flying Sailor (Amanda Forbis, Wendy Tilby, Canada)
• Ice Merchants (João Gonzalez, Portugal, France, U.K.)
• My Year of Dicks (Sara Gunnarsdóttir, U.S.)
• An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It (Lachlan Pendragon, Australia)

Best Visual Effects:

• All Quiet on the Western Front (Frank Petzold, Viktor Müller, Markus Frank and Kamil Jafar)
• Avatar: The Way of Water (Joe Letteri, Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon and Daniel Barrett)
• The Batman (Dan Lemmon, Russell Earl, Anders Langlands and Dominic Tuohy)
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Geoffrey Baumann, Craig Hammack, R. Christopher White and Dan Sudick)
• Top Gun: Maverick (Ryan Tudhope, Seth Hill, Bryan Litson and Scott R. Fisher)

Most award experts had predicted that Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, DreamWorks’ Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and Dean Fleischer’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On would land on the nominees’ list, as all three had appeared on most of the year-end best-of lists, critics’ picks and guild prize shortlists. Two other critically acclaimed pictures Turning Red from Pixar and Chris Williams’ The Sea Beast took the remaining two spots. Feature no-shows were Nora Twomey’s My Father’s Dragon (Cartoon Saloon/Netflix) Masaaki Yuasa’s  Inu-oh (GKIDS), Henry Selick’s Wendell & Wild, (Netflix), Kyle Balda’s Minions: The Rise of Gru (Illumination/Universal) and Angus MacLane’s Lightyear (Pixar).

With the exception of Apple’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, the Best Animated Shorts nominees were all indie projects which had fared well at festivals around the world over the past year. Absent from this category were any studio-produced shorts, from big players such as Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, Netflix, Illumination or Warner Bros. Animation. In fact, the nominees in this category could very well be competing at one of the popular global animation festivals such as Annecy, Ottawa Int. Animation Festival or Animafest. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio was shortlisted for Best Song and Best Soundtrack, but it failed to make it to other categories beyond the Best Animated Picture race.

Last year, Disney’s critical and commercial success Encanto took home the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, while the prize for Best Animated Short went to Alberto Mielgo’s Windshield Wiper. Denis Villeneuve’s epic adaptation of Dune was the winner of the Best Visual Effects Oscar.

The 95^th edition of the Academy Awards will be held on Sunday, March 12^th, at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center in Hollywood, and will be televised live on the ABC Television Network. The Oscars also will be televised live in more than 225 countries and territories worldwide.

See oscars.org for the complete list of nominees.