Having Dominated the Annie Awards, Can Netflix Win Best Animated Film?

Scene from I Lost My Body

In a year that many are arguing is among the most predictable Oscar nominations in history, there is one field that seems ripe with interesting contradictions. The Best Animated Film category felt like it was set in stone since before the year was over. Disney was scheduled to dominate with two of the biggest films of the year: Toy Story 4 and Frozen II, both sequels to films that won the category previously. However, things began to unravel from there. Frozen II missed the cut entirely. In fact, the studio with a dual nomination was the one that was least expected: Netflix. With I Lost My Body and Klaus, the studio pulled one of the biggest upsets of the year. But, what if this is only the beginning? What if Netflix is on track to beat the major studios in the CGI landscape?

While there's still plenty to argue against this, the news just keeps looking worse and worse for Disney and Pixar. At the Annie Awards, Netflix won 19 awards including Best Feature for Klaus and Best Independent Feature for I Lost My Body. This isn't to say that Netflix has the upper-hand, but it's looking like this may be one of the most surprising upsets in recent years. What lies ahead at an Oscars where Pixar is already being undermined at other awards ceremonies by its competition? One has to wonder what lies ahead if either Netflix film stands a decent chance of beating the big boys. Even if it's a longshot, it feels like a good time to think that things are changing in the Best Animated Film category, maybe for the better.

Something that gets overlooked every year when assessing the Best Animated Film category is how biased The Academy has been since the award's inception. Yes, the first winner was Shrek and Spirited Away did win, but looking at the other years will quickly see that Disney and Pixar have dominated these fields. It has been biased towards American animation in embarrassing ways, and it has only really begun to shift in recent years. Pixar has missed the category a few times for films like Cars 3 and Finding Dory, but their hold on the category still felt inevitable until last year's big winner shook things up. Yes, for the first time in many years a film produced by someone other than a Disney subsidiary won. Sony Animation's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse became the first upset in so long that it feels like maybe it opened a door to something more exciting in the years ahead.

Spider-Man was in a lot of ways the dark horse favorite from the beginning. It was a superhero movie from a rival studio. It had talking pigs and girls who hung out with robots. It was weird and unconventional. The animation played with frame rates and the designers claimed to have invented new software just to make it all flow together. It was more of a miracle than any other film nominated. It was abstract and strange, creating a universe just as rich as its Spider-Verse moniker would suggest. In one of the rare cases, people could believe that anything was possible. The most noteworthy was that CGI animation that took risks in form could be challenged and actually win awards.

That is what makes this year's nominees all the more exciting. Whereas Toy Story 4 was a captivating story, many could argue that it's more of the same. In fact, many would suggest that it's the first unnecessary sequel in the franchise. Meanwhile, one can look at Netflix's two films and see something more innovative going on. Klaus and I Lost My Body are unconventional animated films that mix hand drawn animation with other techniques that pop off the screen. I Lost My Body is also incredible because it mixes abstract narration with beautiful animation that turns a macabre concept into something beautiful. Klaus meanwhile feels like a successor to Don Bluth's somewhat dark tone that makes the origin story of Santa Claus more than a novelty. In fact, it currently ranks on Letterboxd as the highest-rated animated film of the 2010s. 

This isn't to discredit Laika Studios' Missing Link, which won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Film recently as well. Over the course of a decade, the studio has reinvented the stop motion genre into something more accessible and weird. To discredit the magic of Missing Link is to miss out on some of the most beautiful, painstaking technique put into any animated film. It's also an adventure film for families, and it feels rich with life and movement that make it such a thrill to watch. Still, Laika hasn't had as much success this season as Netflix and makes their shot at victory all the more unprecedented. Still, recognizing a studio with the consistency of Laika would be a nice touch in a year like this. Even then, the fact that it's stained with the "box office bomb" moniker and remains underseen and underrepresented in awards season makes it a harder wall to climb.

Any of these three would be an exciting and unexpected winner in a year that could go any direction. Netflix clearly has had a phenomenal upgrade in representation this year, earning multiple nominations from Best Picture nominees The Irishman and Marriage Story as well as acting nods for The Two Popes. There's so much to like about their groundswell this year, and it's in part their approach to animation that is not like what we've seen dozens of times before from Pixar. Maybe it's all a backlash to Disney buying Fox and changing the industry as a whole. Maybe this is all just wishful thinking. Either way, the absence of Frozen II already says a lot about where things could go. 

There is, of course, the other big boy in Dreamworks' How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World. Despite having the entire trilogy nominated, neither of the previous films have won the category. It does feel like a conventional winner provided The Academy has any love for how it uses CGI animation to create magical new worlds full of dragons. If talking from a craft level, it's maybe the least interesting compared to Missing Link, I Lost My Body, and Klaus. Many see it as the inferior third entry in a series as well, having been lesser than the first film that famously lost to Toy Story 3. It could win as the culmination of a fantastic franchise, though there's been little to suggest Dreamworks' potential to win, seeing as they haven't had a major win in almost 20 years.

One could argue that this is all naive and that the Best Animated Film category could go in such a boring, predictable direction. Maybe eliminating Frozen II was a way to shift all votes to Toy Story 4. Even then, why not imagine a scenario where it doesn't win? This could be one of the great shifts in the category that we've been waiting for. Maybe Spider-Man kicked things off on a high note, proving that anyone can win this category with quality and ingenuity. The only real difference is that Toy Story 4 is the most recognizable name on the list, having earned the most money and produced one of the most memorable animated characters of the year (Forky). There's so much still in the air, but if the Annie Awards are anything to take opinions from, it's that Pixar isn't as much of a safe bet as it thinks it is. Though is this the year that Netflix takes it, or will The Academy still be stuck wanting to praise CGI animation over the more artistically intriguing competition? There's a lot of hope that this is the one character that doesn't just feel like a repeat of history.