This season’s race for best animated feature is one of the most stylistically varied in recent memory, a category where the technique on screen matters as much as the story. At one end are the studio behemoths — the glossy, four-quadrant CGI machines that have long dominated the field. Yet even the majors are wobbling. Pixar’s Elio stalled at the box office despite the studio’s trademark polish, and even Disney Animation’s undeniable Zootopia 2 — the sequel to the 2016 Oscar-winning billion-dollar hit which opened to a record $556 million worldwide this past weekend — has its detractors (THR’s Frank Scheck was among the film’s boosters).
Netflix is on sturdy ground with Alex Woo’s Pixar-style CGI feature In Your Dreams, but the streamer’s true awards frontrunner is KPop Demon Hunters. The come-from-nowhere sensation from directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, and Netflix’s first bona fide box-office hit, leads a wave of anime-driven contenders that signal the medium’s shift from cult TV fandom to mainstream moviegoing. Sony/Crunchyroll’s Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle (global box office $750 million and counting) and Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc (more than $175 million) join KPop Demon Hunters in pushing Japanese and Korean animation styles into the center of the awards conversation.
KPop Demon Hunters blends Hollywood-CGI with Korean mythology and story beats, while both Demon Slayer and Chainsaw Man use hybrid 2D/3D approaches that pair traditional character animation with digitally generated environments. The two Japanese titles are also hyper-violent, R-rated features aimed squarely at adults — far from the PG-friendly lane that defined most animation winners in years past. “Young audiences don’t see animation as a genre or as kids’ content,” says In Your Dreams director Alex Woo. “They know it can be mature, emotional, violent, whatever. In the West, it’s slower, but it’s changing.”
Across Europe, hand-drawn animation continues to hold its ground, with French filmmakers in particular pushing against the standardized CG look. Arco, the debut feature from French illustrator Ugo Bienvenu (released in the U.S. by Neon), uses a clean, graphic 2D style inspired by Studio Ghibli, bande dessinée comics, and 1970s pulp animation. GKids’ Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, from Liane-Cho Han and Maïlys Vallade, takes a more impressionistic approach, using hand-drawn compositions to evoke a child’s-eye view of the natural world. “We love working without outlines, so characters blend into the backgrounds,” says Han. “It really fits with the story of early childhood.”
Sylvain Chomet’s A Magnificent Life, a Sony Pictures Classics contender about French writer-filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, offers another variation on artisanal European draftsmanship — intimate in scale, and pointedly unbothered by the horsepower of CG rendering.
“The work I’m doing hasn’t changed much from what Walt Disney was doing in the 1950s,” Chomet tells THR. “I work with a computer screen. But everything is still drawn, still painted, with these digital tools.”
Commercially, the rise of non-U.S. animation has redrawn the field. Demon Slayer and Chinese blockbuster Ne Zha 2 (not Oscar-qualified) were, pre-Zootopia 2, the two most successful animated films of the year, reinforcing how global fan cultures and regional styles are reshaping what animated blockbusters can look like.
And while 3D CGI remains the style to beat at the Oscars — two-thirds of all winners, 18 of 24, have been studio-style photorealistic CGI — the Academy’s preferences are shifting. The past three winners, Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion Pinocchio, Hayao Miyazaki’s hand-drawn The Boy and the Heron, and Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow, a 3D feature created with open-source software, suggest an Academy increasingly open to innovation, and an awards race no longer defined by any one aesthetic.
