Hayao Miyazaki Wins N.Y. Critics’ Prize for “The Wind Rises”

Yesterday, the New York Film Critics Circle announced their 2013 award winners, and their choice for the best animated film of the year was Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises.

How much of a predictor are the New York film critics for the Oscar? Well, in the 12 years that the Gotham critics and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences have both handed out an award for feature animation, they have agreed just four times—WALL·E (2008), Happy Feet (2006), The Incredibles (2004), and Spirited Away (2002).

The New York Film Critics Circle have proven themselves to be more open to a variety of animation techniques than the Oscars, which exhibit a strong bias towards a single technique. Here is the breakdown of which animation techniques have won awards in the animated feature category of each organization:

New York Film Critics Circle
(13 awards handed out for best animated feature)
Drawn animation: 46%
Stop-motion: 23%
Computer animation: 23%
Digital Animation: 8%

Oscars (Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences)
(12 awards handed out for best animated feature)
Computer animation: 83%
Drawn animation: 8%
Stop-motion: 8%