2018 Oscar Predictions: ANIMATED FEATURE (November)

Erik Anderson November 1, 2017

This year, voting for Animated Feature makes a big change – everyone in the Academy can vote for nominees. This category, like Foreign Language Film and Documentary Feature, have always been made up of small committees that are able to formulate the eventual nominees but this year it’s all in. What does that mean for smaller and foreign animated films that often benefited from a purely animator vote? Does that mean we’ll get all sequels and studio releases? One thing that’s often kept this category in balance is how generally anti-sequel (or prequel) it’s been. Finding Dory was the highest grossing animated film of 2016 but did it get nominated? Nope. Monsters University? Nada. And Dory came from an Oscar-winning original. Interestingly, non-Disney/Pixar animated films have had better luck with their sequels. Despicable Me and its sequel were nominated. Shrek won and its sequel was nominated. Toy Story 3 sort of defies this but not really since the animated category didn’t exist when the first two films came out.

So what does this year look like? At the moment, Coco (from Disney/Pixar) is a pretty clear frontrunner. But The Breadwinner has been burning up film festivals across the world and could be a very formidable contender here. Loving Vincent is doing gangbuster box office in its arthouse release and Mary and the Witch’s Flower is starting to move up the chart.

We have two Lego movies this year – The Lego Batman Movie and The Lego Ninjago Movie. The former was a critical and box office hit, the latter not so much. It’s an odd gambit to release both of these films in the same year, especially when the original, The Lego Movie, was famously snubbed in this category.

For a wonderfully in-depth look at animated contenders this year, click on over to the coverage from our own Mina Takla. Mina breaks down the contenders, their chances and the race itself with clarity and succinctness.

Here are the official 2018 Oscar Predictions in Animated Feature for November from the Gold Rush Gang. Keep an eye on all of the Gold Rush Gang’s 2018 Oscar predictions updated LIVE throughout the month.

Green – moves up from last month
Red – moves down from last month
Blue – debut/new entry

	ANIMATED FEATURE	ERIK ANDERSON	BRYAN BONAFEDE	GREG HOWARD	EVAN KOST	JASON OSIASON	KENNETH POLISHCHUK	DENIZCAN SÜRÜCÜ	RICHARD ANTHONY	ŞÜKRÜ SÖĞÜT	MATT DINN	TOTAL POINTS
1	Coco	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	50
2	The Breadwinner	2	2	4	2	5	2	2	2	2	4	33
3	The Lego Batman Movie	3		2	5			3	5	3	2	19
4	Mary and the Witch’s Flower		3	3	3	4			4	5	3	17
5	The Boss Baby	5	5	5	4	2	4	5			5	13

6	Ferdinand		4				3	4	3	4		12
7	Loving Vincent	4										2
8	In This Corner of the World					5						1
8	The Lego Ninjago Movie						5					1

OTHER CONTENDERS
Animal Crackers
The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales
Birdboy: The Forgotten Children
Blazing Samurai
Captain Underpants
Cars 3
Despicable Me 3
The Emoji Movie
The Girl Without Hands
Lu Over the Wall
My Little Pony: The Movie
Nut Job 2: Nutty By Nature
Rock Dog
Smurfs: The Lost Village
The Son of Bigfoot
The Star
A Stork’s Journey

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.