2015 Animation Award Tracker: Updates for Features and Shorts

Cartoon Brew just added a major update to its Animation Award Tracker, a first-of-its-kind industry resource that tracks the animated features and shorts that qualify to win year-end awards and honors in the film community.

The goal of the tracker isn’t to promote the nomination of any film over another; rather it is designed to aid voters of the various award-bestowing bodies in making thoughtful, informed decisions based on a complete knowledge of all the contenders.

The feature category takes into account that there are well over a dozen feature animation awards handed out annually. We don’t know specifically which films will qualify for which awards, but most of the films on this list generally qualify for the 2015 competition season.

The 44 films listed in the animated short category are designed specifically to guide members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s animated short film reviewing committee. The committee doesn’t usually know beforehand which films have qualified, even though the data is, for the most part, publicly accessible. By creating this list, we allow voters to study which films have performed well on the qualifying festival circuit and where they have won awards.

The Academy has been roundly criticized for its inability to recognize the full breadth and scope of the animated art form. These criticisms come not just from media outlets like us, but from Oscar winners like Torill Kove, who had her third film nominated last year. “What I think would be really great would be if the Academy’s taste in animation would branch out a bit,” Kove told The Globe and Mail earlier this year. “Here at the [National Film Board of Canada] and other places in the world, there are people that make beautiful animated films that are maybe a little more demanding of the audience.”

Cartoon Brew believes that one of the keys to elevating the profile of the animation categories across all awards and honors is through education. We feel that more information should be available to all the members of the animation community, and that better informed decisions can be made by creating awareness about all the films that are released in a given year. Please enjoy and use our Animation Award Tracker in that spirit.

Award tracker illustration: Chris McDonnell