Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio won, unsurprisingly, the 2023 Oscar for best animated film. Disney/Pixar Has Been Dethroned: But How Many Times Has This Happened? And what meaning did it have?
Read also
Oscar 2023, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio wins for Best Animated Film: it’s a record for Netflix and animation
Disney/Pixar’s Missed Oscars for Best Animated Feature
L’Oscar for the best animated film is one of the most rewards controversial right in the environment: many representatives of the category consider it a ghettoization, because – we subscribe – animation is a technique, not a genre. Moreover, the recognition has not existed for a very long time: it was awarded for the first time in 2002is a young award, despite celebrating a medium that is almost older than live-action cinema.
Just as we are used to associating the name Disney / Pixar at the pinnacle of animation (exaggerating, but it’s done out of affection), so in effect the Academy has celebrated Walt and his line for decades. The Oscar for the animated short for example it was born for the 1932 ceremony and was won by Flowers & Treesthe first cartoon in Technicolor of Disney. Short films then became a niche category when, between the end of the 1940s and the early 1950s, with the advent of TV, the format lost commercial value in theaters and the majors abandoned it.
Since the Oscar for best animated film has existed, it should be noted however that several times it has been missed by Disney/Pixarand each “jump” had the function of a signal. The victory of Pinocchio by Guillermo del Toro is no exception. Let’s take a quick look at the list of competitors.
Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Not Won by Disney/Pixar (and related ceremonies)
2002-2012, external competition
In 2002 already there Pixar dictated the law to boxofficefunded by Disneybut the very first Oscar ever given to a long animated film betrays her: if in your heart you are convinced that the direct suitor Monsters & Co. won, so let’s refresh your memory, because instead it was Shrek who triumphed! There were therefore other studios ready to enter the collective imagination, taking up the challenge of CGI: a clear message. Until the early 1910s, the Pixarian domain was in fact here and there cracked by the blows beaten by the competitionunfortunately only in two cases the embodiment of truly different cultural sensitivities and techniques: theanime per The enchanted city (which also earned Miyazaki a late career award) and the English stop motion by Aardman con Wallace & Gromit (Nick Park had already won the Academy Award for animated shorts several times).
The awards went to Happy Feet e Range instead they were consecrations of principle of studies normally undertaken on visual effects, which have become technically indistinguishable from CGI animation over the past two decades. It is no coincidence that directors such as George Miller e Verbinski Mountainsaccustomed to working with effects engineers, agreed respectively to the Australian Animal Logic and the legendary Industrial Light & Magic to raise his head for a moment and say: “We’ve been doing animation for a lifetime, even if we work because you don’t notice it”.
2013-2023, internal competition and the challenge for the future
Starting with the 2014 ceremony, with the victory of Frozen the ice kingdom, the Pixarian superpower found competition at home. After years of gregarious pursuit of the Pixar “mistress”, i Walt Disney Animation Studios they had reared their heads… with a real bang, and in the years since WDAS/Pixar relay has again made it virtually impossible for external competition to get through to the top five. The two exceptions, however, are very significant and can be an alarm bell for Disney. With Spider-Man: Into a New Universe the Sony Pictures Animation had the courage to throw big-budget feature films into the fray experimental rendering and animation techniques that Disney had only tentatively proposed in shorts like Paperman. Pinocchio by Guillermo del Toro reaffirms the same importance of a look different from the cartoony-photorealistic standard of the latest Pixar-Disney works, and furthermore confirms with an award the commitment that a colossus like Netflix has been infusing into animated productions for a few years now, leaving huge freedom to individual sensibilities. Symbolically, it was Netflix that saved the Disney Renaissance-style freehand animation of the 90s, with Klaus. The proven formulas in CGI of the majors are losing strength, it’s time to take a step forward and think outside the box: as demonstrated by the short films on Disney+ by short circuit (WDAS) and SparkShorts (Pixar) the creative ferment is there. It’s time to promote it, after a very difficult year at the box office, both for Lightyear both for Strange World.
