10 Animated Movies That Should Have Won The Oscar For Best Animation (But Didn't Because The Award Didn't Exist Yet)
These amazing animated films were simply made too early to win an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. It wasn't even an award until 2001 when the Academy introduced it as the newest category in its schedule.
For decades prior, The Academy's stance on animated film had been limited to just celebrating short projects in the medium. The award for Best Animated Short Film began in 1932, five years before Disney's Snow White was to become the first feature-length animation and popularise a whole new way of artistic moviemaking forevermore.
Since 2001, the award for Best Animated Feature has become a huge part of Oscar night, with some of the best films of the years gone by being animated.
Movies such as Toy Story 3 and Spirited Away have walked away with their golden statuettes on Hollywood's biggest night, but what about the animated movies before that? The ones that were every inch as good as what came after yet had little to no platform at the Oscars to shine?
Today, we rank 10 animated movies that deserve to have won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature - but didn't because the award didn't yet exist.
10. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
The image of Jack Skellington has come to be one of the most recognisable in both the Halloween and Christmas season, which is quite a feat whichever way you slice it. The motivation for this misunderstood and genuinely loveable creature is that he is simply bored with his line of work and wants a change.
His subsequent invasion of Christmas Land and impersonation of Santa, though very naughty, comes from the right place and in the end, he falls in love with the re-animated scarecrow thing called Sally. Who can honestly say they don't want that in their own lives?
For a film that is entirely off the wall and totally peculiar, it is such a wonderful affair, and in the years since its release, it has become beloved the world over. It was financially successful at the time and did garner a nomination for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars, which was a first for an animated movie.
Tim Burton's mind is a strange place. However, that makes this film what it is. It holds universal themes in life, such as the yearning to be different, and the pain of unnoticed love. Not bad for a pseudo-Halloween movie.
Looking back, it would have walked away with a win for Best Animated Feature since there was nothing that was quite like it, and it helped show us all that western animation wasn't just for children.