Ranking Disney's Oscar Misses

We're tackling animation this week for reviews, including at least one (hopefully two, but the Trump administration's attacks on the USPS have made it difficult for me to guess if/when I'll get my Netflix discs) Oscar-nominated Best Animated Feature contender, and so I thought it'd be fun to take a look at Disney's domination of this category through the years...but with a twist.

Disney/Pixar has been nominated virtually every single year this category has existed.  Only twice (2005 and 2011) has Disney or Pixar not received a nomination at the Oscars.  It's won 65% of the trophies during that time frame, and received 30% of the nominations.  That's insane.  Obviously Disney-Pixar is the Grand Teton of animation, but it's wild to me that it has received so many nominations and wins in this category, particularly since initially it saw two of its higher-profile pictures (Monsters Inc and Lilo & Stitch) lose.

But...it could have been more.  Disney and Pixar have both missed multiple times, and other smaller studios from the House of Mouse during that time frame (DisneyToon, Vanguard, ImageMovers Digital) all were also releasing movies that would have been eligible for the Oscar.  So I decided it would be fun to randomly list all of the films that missed with AMPAS, ranked from least-surprising to most-surprising omissions based on Oscar's tastes, providing some explanation as to why this didn't happen.  In the category's time frame (2001 to present) 26 fully-animated movies came out from Disney that didn't warrant inclusion from Oscar.  Here are my guesses as to why they missed:

(Note: I'm not listing the partially-animated films as this category has been very unfriendly to films that aren't fully-animated, and I'm also not listing The Lion King in 2019 because for some reason Disney insisted that wasn't animated).

26. Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004)-Did you know that Disney technically was one of the many producers of this film?  Cause I also doubt that anyone else did.

25. The Wild (2006)-Thanks to worldwide grosses, this Madgascar ripoff wasn't the flop that some of the higher-ranked films are, but it's arguably the most obscure movie on this list in the sense that how often does a movie make $100 million and no one has any memory of it?

24. Arjun: The Warrior Prince (2012)-This category's willing to go out on a limb for smaller films, but not from Disney.  Giving an animated film from the behemoth a qualifier run felt disingenuous and didn't fly with Oscar voters.

23. Recess School's Out (2001)-If genuine blockbusters like The Simpsons Movie can't make it into the lineup for Oscar, a Millennial-followed big-screen adaptation of an animated afternoon sitcom isn't going to make it very high.

22. The Jungle Book 2 (2003)-This one actually was a hit in its day, but was critically-dismissed and feels like the sort of movie Disney usually just shoves on a home video release.

21. Return to Neverland (2002)-A slightly more original story gets this one further up, but again, this is the sort of movie that they'd usually just relegate to the back-half of a DVD re-release.

20. Mars Needs Moms (2011)-A colossal critical and commercial failure, one of the biggest bombs in Disney history, and one that tore down ImageMovers Digital.

19. Valiant (2005)-Another forgettable installment from ImageMovers Digital, but at least it earned back its budget.

18. Planes: Fire & Rescue (2014)-Here we have a proper hit for the studio, but as they didn't go for the original, it was doubtful they were going to go for the sequel (only Despicable Me has pulled off something like that with Oscar).

17. Teacher's Pet (2004)-This is the sort of film that might have made it with Oscar from a different studio (it was relatively well-liked by critics), but it was tiny in the year of The Incredibles (and back when this category was just three-wide), so it wasn't close to a nomination.

15/16. Piglet's Big Movie (2003) and Pooh's Heffalump Movie (2005)-I'm grouping these together because they were both pleasant with critics, both were modest hits, and both were part of a trend in the early 2000's where Winnie the Pooh was genuinely rivaling Mickey Mouse for being the most important character in the Disney universe (something we don't see at all today).  Neither was close, but it's worth noting that these were at least bigger deals for audiences than they'd be today.

14. Cars 3 (2017)-If they weren't going to go for the second one, the third one had no real leg to stand upon.

13. Home on the Range (2004)-The film nearly tanked the Disney brand, and certainly ended the hand-drawn animation department at the studio.

12. Meet the Robinsons (2007)-Critics were indifferent, but it made some money.  It was just kind of ghoulish compared to Ratatouille, and 2007 was hard to get a movie into this contest.

11. Planes (2013)-This was after the shock exclusion of Cars 2, so it wasn't unthinkable that Planes would miss.  However, as I mentioned above, when Disney makes a hit the Oscars pay attention, and lord knows that Planes was a monster hit.

10. Disney's A Christmas Carol (2009)-We're now into films that probably were more in consideration, either in theory or in practicality.  This release from ImageMovers was a big hit, and was released when this kind of motion capture would've been groundbreaking and the animators would've taken notice.  Still, the reviews weren't great.

9. Monsters University (2013)-Only the second Pixar movie to get snubbed, this one had better reviews than Cars 2, and perhaps more importantly, a gargantuan Box Office (it was the third-highest grossing film of the year, well ahead of the nominated Croods).  But Oscar never proved all that interested in Pixar sequels until 2018.

8. Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)-In the early days of the Oscars, there weren't really a lot of films competing for these nominations (this was before the international animated films became a regular feature of the category), and so a major release like Atlantis was in contention for the third slot against Jimmy Neutron and Waking Life.

7. Winnie the Pooh (2011)-I have to assume that this was in the running in 2011.  The Pooh craze had gone by the wayside, but unlike some of the other films from that year, this was a movie that critics liked-it wouldn't have looked bad had it been nominated.

6. Finding Dory (2016)-The movie was well-liked by critics and made a fortune, but by 2016 it was apparent that both the Globes & the Oscars weren't thrilled with Pixar making so many sequels.  That being said, its box office and Rotten Tomatoes score indicate that this was in the running.

5. Chicken Little (2005)-Yes, it's critically-dismissed and yes, it's largely thought as the low-point of the studio before it recovered in the late 2000's, but it was a massive hit in 2005, its stars presented at the Oscars, and keep in mind that in 2005, it was Disney's only real shot at a nomination.  This was probably in fourth place in 2005.

4. Frozen II (2019)-By 2019, Disney had broken the barrier when it came to nominating its sequels, but it was obvious they didn't like being forced to do it, and with Toy Story 4 already on their plate, they probably thought they could dismiss the (disappointing) Frozen sequel.  But considering the Box Office and Best Original Song nomination, it didn't miss by much.

3. Cars 2 (2011)-In 2011, Pixar had never missed with Oscar, and while Cars 2 wasn't well-liked, it was assumed that it would sneak in (after all, it did at the Globes).  Oscar, however, continued a trend we'd see for the rest of the decade (one that had cost Disney the year before in a big way), by picking two obscure films (Chico & Rita and A Cat in Paris) instead of giving Disney any loving in 2011.  This was way closer than you'd think, though.

2. The Good Dinosaur (2015)-The other shoe dropped in 2015 for Pixar, when The Good Dinosaur (which was not successful, and was an afterthought with critics), was snubbed by Oscar in favor of Boy and the World.  But its presence at the Globes and the Annie Awards indicate that most of us weren't crazy in 2015 to predict this, assuming that Pixar was unstoppable with Oscar (I suspect, again, that this was sixth place).

1. Tangled (2010)-I'd wager that all of the Top 6 were "next on deck" for a nomination, but no film feels more at-odds with a Disney snub than Tangled.  It had it all (critics, box office, a Best Original Song nomination), but in a true shocker it was left off of the 2010 list, as was the mammoth success Despicable Me, for the elegant The Illusionist, a tiny film that paid homage to Jacques Tati.  After that film and The Secret of Kells the previous year, we learned that not even Disney could fence with the category's penchant for beautifully-done low-key animated fare.