2025 Oscars: Best Animated Feature Predictions

Nominations voting is from January 8-12, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 17, 2025. Final voting is February 11-18, 2025. And finally, the 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2 and air live on ABC at 7 p.m. ET/ 4 p.m. PT. We update our picks through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions.

The State of the Race

DreamWorks’ “The Wild Robot” (Universal) has Oscar momentum, thanks to 10 Annie nominations (including Best Feature, Best Direction for Chris Sanders, and Best Music for Kris Bowers). This follows the four Golden Globe nominations for Best Animated Feature, Best Original Song (“Kiss the Sky”), Best Original Score for Bowers, and Cinematic and Box Office Achievement.

Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” (Disney), which collected seven Annie noms (including Best Feature), is still very much in the Oscar race, as is critics’ favorite “Flow” (Sideshow/Janus Films), which earned three Annie noms (Best Independent Feature, Best Direction for Gints Zilbalodis, and Best Writing). The Latvian film won Best Animated Feature from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, as well as the National Board of Review and the European Film Award.

Aardman’s “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” (Netflix) also earned seven Annie noms (including Best Feature and Best Direction for Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham) and is a sleeper in the Oscar race. The other consequential Best Feature nominees are Locksmith’s “That Christmas” (Netflix) and “Ultraman: Rising” (Netflix). In addition, the frontrunning “Memoir of a Snail” (IFC) was nominated for Best Independent Feature, as was contender “Chicken for Linda!” (GKids). The 52nd Annual Annie Awards will be held at UCLA’s Royce Hall on February 8, 2025.

“The Wild Robot,” one of the best films ever from DreamWorks (adapted from Peter Brown’s illustrated book), is a sci-fi adventure that finds robot Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) washed ashore on an uninhabited island. She must adapt and live among the animals, eventually adopting orphaned gosling bird Brightbill (Kit Connor). DreamWorks embraces an impressionistic 2D aesthetic (inspired by Tyrus Wong’s legendary watercolor backgrounds in “Bambi” and Hayao Miyazaki’s lush forests) that’s the most impressive hand-drawn stylization since the influential “Spider-Verse.” Thanks to new tech, DreamWorks hand-painted all of the environments as mattes while also applying 2D textures and shaders to Roz and the various animals. The more time Roz spends in the wild, the more her surface changes with dents, scratches, mildew, and mold. She very quickly becomes a hand-painted surface, blending in with the animals and the wilderness.

“Inside Out 2,” this year’s surprise box office phenomenon ($1.6 billion worldwide, a first for animation), put Pixar back on top theatrically after its recent drought. First-time director Kelsey Mann tapped into anxiety as the newest and most resonant emotion for 13-year-old Riley (Kensington Tallman). Voiced brilliantly by Maya Hawke, the hyper-active, orange, and stringy Anxiety mounts a hostile takeover of Riley’s emotions with cohorts Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser). While Riley goes into overdrive to impress at summer hockey camp, Joy (Amy Poehler) and the regulars attempt to restore Riley’s Belief System and Sense of Self, which represent the latest world-building wonders from Pixar.

‘Inside Out 2’©Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection

“Flow,” Latvia’s shortlisted international feature Oscar entry, is a sublime, dialogue-free adventure from director Gints Zilbalodis (“Away”). It’s about an earth inhabited by animals forced to overcome their differences to survive a great flood. It focuses on a black cat that shares a boat with a capybara, lemur, stork, and golden retriever. Animated in the open-source Blender with its real-time engine, the CG animals have a soft quality while the environments are sharper. Zilbalodis achieves an immersion with his roving camera and is served well by his animation team based in Latvia, France, and Belgium.

“Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” directed by franchise creator Park and creative director Crossingham, marks the feature-length return of Aardman’s favorite stop-motion pals, who struggle with their first existential crisis because of Wallace’s obsession with invention. It’s about an out-of-control “smart gnome,” Norbot (Reece Shearsmith), with a mind of its own. The fiendish plot also involves fan-favorite Feathers McGraw, the villainous penguin from the Oscar-winning short “The Wrong Trousers.”

“Memoir of a Snail,” which took this year’s Annecy Cristal Award and also won the Animation Is Film Audience Award, is the second stop-motion feature from Adam Elliot (“Mary and Max”), the claymation master of monochromatic melancholy. The semi-autobiographical story concerns sad, lonely, and snail-hoarding Gracie (Sarah Snook), who narrates her life story in a letter to favorite snail, Sylvia. She details her life of mistreatment and the trauma that led to her retreating from life. Gracie pines for her long-lost twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who’s had it rough as well on the other side of the country with an abusive religious cult.

“Ultraman: Rising” represents Tindle’s passion project, which personalizes Ultraman as an ode to parenthood and achieving balance in life. Baseball superstar Ken Sato (Christopher Sean) has difficulty fighting kaiju in Tokyo as a family obligation, and is further tested when forced to adopt a 35-foot, fire-breathing baby kaiju girl. Tindle (“Lost Ollie”) tapped ILM (the VFX powerhouse’s first animated feature since the Oscar-winning “Rango”) to tackle a stunning 2D aesthetic combining manga and anime, coupled with dynamic camera moves and lighting.

“That Christmas” finds screenwriter Richard Curtis adapting his trio of books about the holiday into a “Love Actually” riff. “How to Train Your Dragon” animation vet Simon Otto directs with a sweet and absurd touch. It’s animated by Double Negative with an illustrative aesthetic. The voice cast is led by Brian Cox, Fiona Shaw, Jodie Whittaker, Lolly Adefope, and Alex Macqueen, and the score is by John Powell (the “How to Train Your Dragon” franchise).

‘Flow’Courtesy of Cannes

“Chicken for Linda!,” last year’s Annecy Cristal winner, is a charming, hand-painted French-Italian musical comedy directed by the married duo Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach (the animated “The Girl Without Hands”). It explores memory and mother-daughter bonding in what becomes a wild chase to catch a chicken to make chicken and peppers. It combines the spontaneity of the French New Wave with “All That Jazz”-inspired musical numbers. All the characters are color-coded (Linda, the child, is yellow), and they add color blotches to black brushstrokes that bleed over the character lines.

“Moana 2″(Disney) began as a Disney+ series at the studio’s new Vancouver studio but then transitioned to a feature amidst early praise, expanding its story, scope, and animation with assistance from the Burbank studio. Directed by David Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, and Dana Ledoux Miller, Moana (Auliʻi Cravalho) returns to find the lost island of Motufetu, hidden by the jealous God of Storms, to reconnect all of the communities of Oceania. Demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) is back, but the sequel introduces baby sister Simea (Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda) and new crew members. Mark Mancina and Opetaia Foa’i return as composers and co-songwriters, joined by songwriters Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear.

“The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie” (Ketchup Entertainment) stars Daffy and Porky (both voiced by Eric Bauza) in the franchise’s first fully 2D-animated theatrical feature. The duo discover a secret alien plot to take over the world via mind-control and chewing gum. It’s a delightful surprise, directed by Pete Browngardt (“Looney Tunes Cartoons”), who captures the essence of Daffy and Porky with wit and warmth, channeling the outrageous Bob Clampett.

“The Colors Within” (GKids), the acclaimed anime directed by Naoko Yamada (“A Silent Voice”), which earned the Animation Is Film Audience Award, concerns a high school student who forms a band with the ability to see the “colors” of others (bliss, excitement, serenity). The animation is from Japanese studio Science SARU.

ILM also worked on “Transformers One” (Paramount), the franchise’s animated spinoff from Oscar-winning “Toy Story 4” director Josh Cooley. It’s a new origin story, exploring an untapped subterranean robot world with its own aesthetic, scale, and scope. We’re introduced to the future Optimus Prime and Megatron as Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry), and their story and adventure has its roots in “Ben-Hur.”

‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’Courtesy of Netflix

“Piece by Piece” (Focus Features), the documentary about musical icon Pharrell Williams from Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville (“20 Feet from Stardom”), utilizes an inspired conceit from Williams: It’s a LEGO animated brickfilm, which perfectly captures the artist’s sense of wonder. Pure Imagination and Tongal produced the visual storytelling with the technology of Unreal Engine. The narrative is wrapped around Neville’s interviews with Williams and a host of other artists in his life, including Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Busta Rhymes, Jay Z, and Snoop Dogg.

“Look Back” (GKids), from first-time director Kiyotaka Oshiyama (“The Boy and the Heron” animator), is adapted from the critically acclaimed manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto (“Chainsaw Man”). It’s about the highs and lows of creative collaboration between Fujino, who’s forced to share space in her comics section of the high school newspaper with Kyomoto, a social misfit whose beautiful artwork sparks a competitive fervor in her.

“Living Large” (Gebeka International), the Annency Jury Award-winning stop-motion comedy from Kristina Dufková (a 13-year passion project), follows a teen struggling with bullies, puberty, and his weight. It offers exotic animals and multiple cooking sequences that spawned a companion cookbook in the Czech Republic and France.

“The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” (Warner Bros.) marks the first anime film in the franchise, with Kenji Kamiyama directing the 2D prequel (Sola Entertainment translated the 2D from performance-captured sessions using the Unreal Engine). It explores the tragic consequences of war and revenge, telling the story of Helm Hammerhand (voiced by Brian Cox), the legendary king of Rohan, and his family, as they defend their kingdom against the ruthless Dunlendings, ruled by Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), the lord of Dunland, who seeks revenge for the death of his father. The film is narrated by Rohan descendant and future shieldmaiden Éowyn (Miranda Otto).

Potential nominees are listed in alphabetical order; no film will be deemed a frontrunner until we have seen it.

Frontrunners

“Flow”
“Inside Out 2”
“Memoir of a Snail”
“Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl”
“The Wild Robot”

Contenders