Oscar Best Animated Pictures Quiz

Wow, I love Spirited Away, and I totally missed it.

lol, I got just because you mentioned it on Friday

Wall-E was great.

Yeah, couldn't disagree with you more. I think it depends alot on your maturity level - it didn't appeal as much to little kids, more to older kids, teens, and adults.

Really? We watched it 5 times in 3 days with my niece and nephew. They were under 5 years old at the time. How young are younger kids? Also they played birthday with my stuffed Wall-E, so. They loved it.

Just trying to figure out who would think of it as boring. My son was under 10 at the time and thought the first half was terrible, because there was no dialogue.

My youngest grandchildren at the time weren't too keen on it, but the ones already in school liked it and I loved it. Of all the ones here, I'd say Zootopia, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille were the biggest hits overall with my brood.

I remember watching it for the first time at a cinema in Hong Kong and thinking to myself... damn... is there really going to be no words in this thing? In what most people are going to see as a "kids" movie? That's pretty damn ballsy.

Wow, I can't imagine what would be a good movie to you. WALL-E was by far my favorite Pixar film.

well take the "ecological" message out of the equation and you have this adorable "love" story. Also I think it deserves credit for going nearly 30 mins with no real dialogue....not an easy feat.

Oh I see. So your objection to the film was based on political bias and had nothing to do with the film's artistic or narrative merits. If you brain shut off immediately after being shocked by the blandly factual admission that humans create garbage- then the rest of the film would indeed be boring. That makes sense, then.

Well, as God said, according to Anne Coulter: "Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours." Happy raping, friend.

Very nicely put @Kalbahamut

I pity anyone who walked away from Wall-E without being moved to some extent

ctleng76, did you also mind the blatant monarchist and anti-egalitarian propaganda in such movies as The Lion King, Frozen, etc.? The hedonist manifesto in The Jungle Book? The crudely socialist incitement to revolt in Robin Hood?

Gee, there's some terrific films here. Animation's where it's at. Esp when you thinki of the films that didn't win. Mary and Max. Triplets of Belleview. Waltzing with Bashir etc.

Pixar is awesomely good with winning the oscars XD!

they're awesomely good at making movies. And once in a while Oscar recognizes good movies.

People in the Academy often vote for people they know or for movies that are hyped around the time in LA, or for American movies simply because they themselves are American, and many members are too busy to see more than a few of all nominated movies. If this were a more international prize with a pickier selection of members, Pixar would probably still rule overall but Japanese cinema would be featured more strongly in the animated category.

Where are Lion King, Ice Age, Madagascar, Monster Inc??

Also in my opinion this year the best was Wreck it Ralph. Brave was slightly above average.

The Lion King is from 1994... and the others, well, the Academy Awards have their good and reasonable years and then the years full of fillers...

Better movies came out those years, or at least that's what Academy voters thought at the time. There's really only one bad movie in the bunch ("Happy Feet"), and that one benefitted from going up against only 2 other nominees, both of which were just as bad ("Cars" and "Monster House"). The very good "Flushed Away" came out that year from Dreamworks, but was excluded from consideration for some reason - I think it would have won handily over the other nominees. As is very common in life, it's not always about how good you are, but about how much worse everyone else is.

IMO of the movies you mentioned:

1. Cars

2. Monster House

3. Flushed Away

4. Happy Feet

Cars wasn't nearly as bad as Happy Feet, though it was the worst thing Pixar had ever done (and would remain so up until Cars 2).

Actually it's interesting you ask about The Lion King because in some ways The Lion King is responsible for there even being an Oscar for best animated picture. Before The Lion King in 1992 Disney made Beauty and the Beast, which was nominated for best picture (the first animated film in history to be nominated) and probably should have won, but even the fact that it was nominated angered some snooty Hollywood types who didn't recognize animated films as real films or voice actors as real actors. Then, in '94, The Lion King came out, was HUGELY successful making TONS of money. Toy Story came out the following year, also making boat loads of money. Of course, this inspired copy cats. Up until '94 there really was no competition for Disney in the US. Don Bluth made a movie once in a while but all the other animation studios that weren't making Saturday morning toy commercials (i.e. GI Joe or Transformers) had pretty much died in the 70s and 80s. continued...

anyway, all that changed after The Lion King. Other studios saw dollar signs and all of a sudden Dreamworks and Fox had their very own animation departments and before long they were cooking up ways to try and steal some market share from Disney and Pixar. Antz was made as a rip-off of A Bug's Life, The Prince of Egypt was known at Dreamworks as "The Zion King," and these films were followed up by The Road to El Dorado, Ice Age and Shrek. Warner Bros tried to get in on the action as well I think their first offering was Quest for Camelot. They didn't do as well as Fox or Dreamworks. Anyway, before long there were a ton of animated movies coming out every year compared to the small handful we had (in the US) before the Lion King. We also saw more foreign animated movies released in the US after the in-roads made by Ghost in the Shell and Princess Mononoke, etc. This coupled with the fact that the Academy didn't want to repeat the '92 controversy led to the creation of the animated oscar.

The only other animated films to be nominated for Best Picture were Toy Story 3 and Up, and that was only after the field of nominated films was expanded to a maximum of 10. With 10 films nominated, it was safe to nominate animated films again (and other deserving movies like Inception that normally would have not been nominated) and people wouldn't get so upset about it. But, now that they have the Best Animated Picture category it's pretty safe to say that an animated film will never win Best Picture even if it deserves it. So it's a win/loss for animated films in general.

These comments are just the best. One point I'll take some umbrage to is that Antz was a rip-off of A Bug's Life. That's really oversimplifying the ongoing "war" between Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks. They have released very-similarly-premised movies within a year of each other at least half a dozen times since Katzenburg left Disney and formed DreamWorks. DreamWorks has more-often-than-not been first to the theaters and has certainly held their own in the "which one was better" race. A Bugs Life < Antz; The Wild < Madagascar; Finding Nemo > Shark Tale; Ratataouille > Flushed Away (not by a ton, though); and Monsters Inc. vs. Shrek is pretty much a draw. There was also Emperor's New Groove vs. Road to El Dorado, but they were both pretty bad.

I liked A Bug's Life much better than Antz, but.. The Wild? what is that? Hold on...

::google, google::

hm... how did I miss that? Doesn't look even vaguely familiar. I wasn't even living overseas in 2006. Must have blocked it out. But anyway that was Disney, not Pixar. And Disney movies of that era (mid-2000s were mostly pretty horrible)

Also, the Ice Age and Madagascar movies blow. They make lots of money but have little to no artistic merit.

Not sure "artistic merit" is the point of those films. It's to make kids laugh and then beg their parents to keep taking them to see it and buy the DVDs. They are spectacularly successful at that. You're certainly entitled to your opinion that they "blow", but my kids love the Madagascar movies.

Well, that's fine. Just don't expect them to win an Oscar. I was responding to a comment asking where Ice Age and Madagascar were on a quiz about animated films that have won Oscars.

Agreed that they are not oscar-worthy movies. But even with lots more animated films being made, anything by Dreamworks or Disney or Pixar will get a nomination.

If you look up the requirements for getting an animated film into the Academy competition you'll see why some of the best films aren't nominated. It's much more complicated than non-animated films, including a requirement to have a theatrical release in Los Angeles County within the year. Some don't want to take the time to jump through all the hoops to qualify, and then fill out the required paperwork.

It's interesting Brave won the Oscar for best picture when it was the least well-reviewed film of the five that were nominated this year. I made a quiz for the 100-best-reviewed animated films of all time and Brave isn't even on that list, though the four films it was competing against this year are. I'm not saying Brave didn't deserve to win, it's just odd. Look at my quiz and you'll see.

That was very interesting :-)

Oh, yes, one has to be very "high-brow" to appreciate the historical dramas of Crash, Birdman, The Hurt Locker, Slumdog Millionaire, No Country for Old Men, The Departed, Million Dollar Baby, Chicago, Lord of the Rings...I will agree on one point, however. They do not reward comedies.

I agree with ander217. However, the Academy is heavily criticised, more than it should. In my opinion, they do reward, more often than not, the best in each category. Comedies are less universal than dramas and animated pictures. The culture differences play hugely on how these (comedies) movies are accepted.

I've seen all of these, and in my opinion it's a dead heat between Rango and Happy Feet as to the worst one. My sister-in-law convinced me to take the family to Rango and the ads for it made it look OK. Definitely NOT a kids movie, whereas you can take small kids to any of the others.

How the heck would Cars exist alongside any of the others?

but Cars isn't like Toy Story or A Bug's Life or Finding Nemo- films where human beings exist in parallel. In the world of Cars every lifeform is some kind of car and there are no humans at all.

If I remember, the theory says Cars takes place after humans have fled the earth (as depicted in Wall-E), at a point at which the evolution of machines (first referenced with Syndrome's A.I. machine in the Incredibles) is in a stage in which everything is a car. Following the end of Wall-E, the plants and bugs regenerate, but there a very few humans left, which is the time during which the events of A Bug's Life take place. As Simsy said, it's a stretch, and almost certainly not something Pixar actually designed, but it's a fun little idea to play with.

It's a cartoon made for kids, for Pete's sake. Remember those days when nothing had to make sense and you could believe anything you wanted in the Land of Make-Believe? My grandkids loved Cars, and basically any other animated movie which flits across the screen that has characters with big eyes and a plot where the good guy wins in the end. They didn't care what the critics thought of it. I remember when I was a kid watching Pow-wow the Indian Boy on TV and thinking it was the greatest thing ever made. It was only after I grew up that I was able to see the flaws.

Critics? Cartoons for kids are all about imagination and fantasy. Dreaming up how the different stories could connect, fits perfectly. So it is quite the opposite, people that say that the worlds cant be connected thóse are the critics and lack imagination from a kids point of view. Kids will make it work, even if it doesnt not seem to all add up, they ll invent a rule/reason why it would work. I think many kids will think of how and if some of these movies are connected. (The how is not relevant for the very young, because they can see it as totally real)

AHHHHHHHHH, missed Big Hero 6! HOW?

Brave, Toy Story 3, Big Hero 6 have oscars? Well it's sure now easy to point which company has its hand over movie industry :P

Big Hero 6 wasn't that good but Brave was fine and Toy Story 3 was great. What are you implying?

I still can't get over the fact that they nominated The Boss Baby this year. LEGO Batman was much better than that piece of garbage.

I watched Lego batman with my kids and left feeling like I'd had a seizure.

I loved Lego Batman. Definitely agree.

Too Pixar-Centric

Got everything except Rango. I've never even heard of that one, so I googled it and then remembered that I did see a trailer for it before, I just didn't care for it. xD

Got Rango, missed Shrek

I was thinking so hard about what that robot movie in 2015 could be. I was so sure it had to be Baymax, which is what the movie is called where I live.

Toy Story 3 beat the Lorax, and Happy Feet beat Cars? What kind of messed-up world is this?

I think the only people who'd rank The Lorax over Toy Story 3 are those who haven't seen the first two Toy Storys. Otherwise, I'd think differently about them.

Zootopia was good, but I thought Moana should have won.

I liked Moana, and Disney has gotten a lot better since bottoming out with Chicken Little while Pixar has lost some of its edge in recent years, but, in general, have to strongly disagree that Disney movies are better so much better than Pixar movies, or ever better at all. Historically it's more often been the opposite.

Oscar is biased towards Hollywood and the US as a whole because there a tons of animated movies better than these. The only non-american is Spirited Away. I liked Your Name more than Zootopia but Zootopia got the Oscar and there are a lot of more French and Japanese animations which deserves an Oscar but .....

Spirited Away's original title is not accepted.

Then write it in English.

Toy Story 4 was okay, but watching it the whole time I remember thinking to myself just how completely unnecessary the whole exercise felt. Part 3 would have been a much stronger finish to the series, in addition to making more sense as a conclusion to the story.

It's mostly a whose who of disney films.

Your Name would have deserved an oscar.