Academy Award for Best Animated Feature

The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature is given each year for the best animated film. An animated feature is defined by the academy as a film with a running time of more than 40 minutes in which characters' performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique, a significant number of the major characters are animated, and animation figures in no less than 75 percent of the running time. The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature was first awarded in 2002 for films released in 2001.

The entire AMPAS membership has been eligible to choose the winner since the award's inception. If there are sixteen or more films submitted for the category, the winner is voted from a shortlist of five films, otherwise there will only be three films on the shortlist.

History
For much of the Academy Awards' history, AMPAS was resistant to the idea of a regular award for animated features, considering there were simply too few produced to justify such consideration. Instead, the Academy occasionally bestowed special Oscars for exceptional productions, usually for Walt Disney Pictures, such as for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938, and the Special Achievement Academy Award for the live action/animated hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1989 and Toy Story in 1996. In fact, prior to the award's creation, only one animated film was nominated for Best Picture: 1991's Beauty and the Beast, also by Disney.

By 2001, the rise of sustained competitors to Disney in the feature animated film market, such as DreamWorks Animation (founded by former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg), created an increase of film releases of significant annual number enough for AMPAS to reconsider. The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature was first given out at the 74th Academy Awards, held on March 24, 2002. The academy included a rule that stated that the award would not be presented in a year in which fewer than eight eligible films opened in theaters. It dropped the rule on April 23, 2019, to make voting for animated films more acceptable. People in the animation industry, as well as fans, expressed hope that the prestige from this award and the resulting boost to the box office would encourage the increased production of animated features.

In 2009, when the nominee slots for Best Picture were doubled to ten, Up was nominated for both Animated Feature and Picture at the 82nd Academy Awards, the first to do so since the inception of the Animated Feature category. This feat was repeated the following year by Toy Story 3.

In 2010, the academy enacted a new rule regarding the motion capture technique employed in films such as A Christmas Carol (2009) and The Adventures of Tintin (2011), directed by Academy Award for Best Director winners Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg respectively, and how they might not be eligible in this category in the future. This rule was possibly made to prevent nominations of live-action films that rely heavily on motion capture, such as Avatar (2009).

In 2022, it was unclear whether Marcel the Shell with Shoes On would be eligible for the award at the 95th Academy Awards due to being a live-action/stop-motion animated hybrid. Director Dean Fleischer Camp said that he and A24 had to submit documentation in order to prove the film had enough animation to meet the award's minimum requirements. The AMPAS officially deemed the film eligible for consideration in the Animated Feature category and was eventually nominated for said category.

Best Picture criticism
As of 2008, some members and fans have criticized the award, however, saying it is only intended to prevent animated films from having a chance of winning and nominating Best Picture. The most notable example is Shrek, became an immediate favorite for the nomination, similar the way of nominating animated films like the animation rivalry's 1991 film Beauty and the Beast; DreamWorks had advertised heavily during the holiday 2001 season for the film like the studio's previous years, but it didn’t materialize the category due to its inauguration of the Best Animated Film category, which sparked criticism from the industry, though it ultimately won the inaugural Best Animated Feature award. Nonetheless, it was successfully nominated for Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy, and also was the first animated film to be nominated for PGA Award for Best Theatrical Motion Picture, BAFTA Award for Best Film, and Critics' Choice Awards for Best Picture, respectively.

Another criticism surrounding the Best Animated Feature category was particularly prominent at the 81st Academy Awards, in which WALL-E won the award but was not nominated for Best Picture, despite receiving widespread acclaim from critics and audiences alike and being generally considered to be one of the best films of 2008. This sparked controversy over whether the film was deliberately snubbed of such nomination by the academy. Film critic Peter Travers commented that "if there was ever a time where an animated feature deserved to be nominated for Best Picture, it's WALL-E." However, official Academy Award regulations state that any film nominated for this category can still be nominated for Best Picture. This, as well as more backlash that The Dark Knight was also not another Best Picture nominee meant that next year, the Academy expanded the Best Picture category. After the expansion, two animated films—Up (2009) and Toy Story 3 (2010)—were nominated for Best Picture.

From 2010 onward, with the increasing competitiveness of the Animated Feature category, Pixar (a perennial nominee) did not receive nominations for several recent films due to the more mixed critical response and comparatively low box-office receipts, while Pixar's sister studio Disney Animation won their first three awards. Not only two animation studios have high chances of nominating films for Best Picture, some animated films have longlisted with the category due to exceeded critical and commercial success. These included Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (Netflix Animation), The Boy and the Heron (Studio Ghibli), and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Sony Pictures Animation).

Studios and films

 * Pixar has the most wins with 11 and the most nominations of any studio with 18.
 * They won the award in four years in a row with their films released between 2007 and 2010.
 * Laika has the most nominations without a win, with 6 films.
 * Almost all the winners have been computer-animated films. The exceptions are Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron, which are the only hand-drawn animated films, and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, the only stop motion animated films to win.
 * Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron (each from Japan) are the first and second non-English language films, respectively, to win. They are also the only two anime films to win.
 * Toy Story is the only franchise with multiple wins, for its third and fourth films.
 * Shrek (with one win) is the most-nominated franchise with four nominations.
 * How to Train Your Dragon and Cartoon Saloon's "Irish Folklore Trilogy" (consisting of The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and Wolfwalkers) are the most-nominated franchises without a win (three nominations each).
 * Of the 13 adult animated films nominated, nine of them —The Triplets of Belleville, Persepolis, The Wind Rises, My Life as a Courgette, The Breadwinner, Loving Vincent, Isle of Dogs, Flee and The Boy and the Heron were each rated PG-13; Anomalisa is the only R-rated animated film to be nominated in this category; Chico and Rita, I Lost My Body, and Robot Dreams were not rated by the MPAA. The Boy and The Heron became the first animated film for adults (in this case, PG-13-rated) winner.
 * There have been years when multiple animated films from the same studio were nominated. They are:
 * 2002 – Disney's Lilo & Stitch and Treasure Planet
 * 2004 – DreamWorks' Shrek 2 and Shark Tale
 * 2011 – DreamWorks' Kung Fu Panda 2 and Puss in Boots
 * 2016 – Disney's Zootopia and Moana
 * 2020 – Pixar's Onward and Soul
 * 2021 – Disney's Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto
 * 2022 – Netflix's The Sea Beast and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
 * Up and Toy Story 3 are the first two films to have won both Best Animated Feature and to have received Best Picture nominations. Their nominations after the Academy expanded the potential number of nominees for Best Picture from 5 to 10.
 * Shrek is the only non-Disney and/or Pixar animated film to be nominated for a screenwriting category, Best Adapted Screenplay, while winning the inaugural Best Animated Feature category.
 * As of 2024, Shrek and WALL-E are the only winners that are inducted in the National Film Registry.
 * Studio Ghibli (Japan) has the most wins for a non-US studio with two wins.
 * Studio Ghibli has the most nominations for a non-US studio with seven films (winning twice for Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron).
 * Flee has the most nominations (3) for both an adult animated and documentary film, and was the first film to be nominated in the categories of Best Animated Feature, Best International Feature Film and Best Documentary Feature Film simultaneously.
 * Two motion capture-related computer-animated films were nominated before a rule change in 2010 disqualified such films: Monster House and Happy Feet (the latter won the award).

People

 * In 2013, Brenda Chapman was the first woman to win for Brave.
 * After his win in 2023, Guillermo del Toro was the first filmmaker to win both the Best Animated Picture (for his adaptation of Pinocchio) and Best Picture (for 2017's The Shape of Water).
 * Pete Docter has the most wins of any individual, winning three awards for Up, Inside Out and Soul.
 * Hayao Miyazaki has the most nominations for a non-US individual, with four films (tied with Pete Docter).
 * Hayao Miyazaki (Japan) has the most wins for a non-US individual with two.
 * Ron Clements, Dean DeBlois, Travis Knight, Tomm Moore, and Chris Sanders are tied for receiving the most nominations without winning, with three each.