BAFTA Nominees Announced: Disney Picks Up Three of Four Feature Film Noms

Nominations for the 70th annual BAFTA Film Awards, the British equivalent of the Academy Awards, were announced this morning in London.

The BAFTAs made a significant change related to their feature animation category this year, expanding the potential number of nominees in the category from three to five. The increase was put into place because, according to BAFTA head of awards Emma Baehr, “What we’ve found is that that sometimes people don’t enter more animated films because there are only three nominations. We want to make sure that as many films are entered so we’re giving the film committee the option to increase the number of nominations in this category to a maximum of five.”

If the goal was to advance diversity in the feature animation category, the BAFTAs botched it badly. Although the new rules allowed for five nominees, the organization selected just four films, and of those films, three were produced by the Walt Disney Company. In the ten years that the BAFTAs have recognized animated features, seven times the award has been given to the Walt Disney Company.

The BAFTAs, presented by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, will be handed out on February 12, 2017, at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Below is the complete list of 2017 nominees for the animation-related categories: animated features, visual effects, and British short animation. In the latter category, all three films are student shorts, with two from the National Film and Television School and one from Kingston University London:

Animated Film

• Finding Dory (Pixar)
• Kubo and the Two Strings (Laika)
• Moana (Disney)
• Zootopia (Disney)

Special Visual Effects

• Arrival (Louis Morin)
• Doctor Strange (Richard Bluff, Stephane Ceretti, Paul Corbould, Jonathan Fawkner)
• Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Tim Burke, Pablo Grillo, Christian Manz, David Watkins)
• The Jungle Book (Robert Legato, Dan Lemmon, Andrew R. Jones, Adam Valdez)
• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Neil Corbould, Hal Hickel, Mohen Leo, John Knoll, Nigel Sumner)

British Short Animation

• The Alan Dimension (Jac Clinch, Jonathan Harbottle, Millie Marsh)
• A Love Story (Khaled Gad, Anushka Kishani Naanayakkara, Elena Ruscombe-King)
• Tough (Jennifer Zheng)