Cartoon Heroes, Assemble! Here Are the Characters That Will Face Off in This Year’s Feature Animation Race

Carolyn Giardina
·5 min read
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A broad range of titles, animation styles and plenty of music define this season’s animated feature race, with some expected contenders still to debut.

For instance, as the studio celebrates its centennial, Walt Disney Animation Studios hopes to grab one of the five nomination slots with its Nov. 22 musical Wish, which tells the story of how Disney’s wishing star came to be. Its voice cast is led by Ariana DeBose as young protagonist Asha and Chris Pine as villainous King Magnifico. The cast performs a collection of original songs from Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice, including “This Wish,” “I’m a Star” and “This Is the Thanks I Get.” Oscar winner Chris Buck (Frozen) and Fawn Veerasunthorn direct, and Disney Animation chief creative officer and Oscar winner Jennifer Lee is a writer and executive producer.

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This title joins an already crowded field. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse — the bold sequel to Oscar winner Into the Spider-Verse that was released this spring — is already considered among the frontrunners. Featuring an ambitious story with an expanded cast of Spideys and distinct stylized worlds, the story follows Miles Morales as he travels through the multiverse. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller return as writers and producers of the Sony Picture Animation title, and they recruited a trio of directors: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson.

Spider-verse earned a whopping $690 million at the global box office. Another hit is Pixar’s Elemental, directed by Peter Sohn, which earned $493 million worldwide. It’s also the first Pixar original to receive a theatrical release since the start of the pandemic. Elemental took inspiration from the experiences of Sohn’s immigrant parents and is set in an imaginative world where fire, water, earth and air residents live together.

Animation legend Hayao Miyazaki’s semi-autobiographical fantasy The Boy and the Heron also must be seriously considered in this year’s race. The Studio Ghibli co-founder has been Academy Award-nominated in the animated feature race three times, winning in 2003 for Spirited Away and receiving an honorary Oscar in 2015. His latest, billed as the 82-year-old filmmaker’s final movie, is a delicately hand-drawn film that follows a Japanese 11-year-old who, after losing his mother in a fire, resides with his father and stepmother when he is visited by a gray heron. It made its international premiere in September in Toronto, as the first animated feature to open TIFF. The movie’s domestic distributor is GKIDS.

Earlier this year, Netflix won the Oscar for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio and earned a second nom for The Sea Beast. This season’s lineup includes Nimona, based on the graphic novel by ND Stevenson. The CG feature began as a production of the former Blue Sky Studios and was shut down when the studio was acquired by Disney as part of the Fox purchase. But the team, including helmers Nick Bruno and Troy Quane, believed in the movie, and Nimona was revived by Annapurna and Netflix. The voice cast is led by Chloë Grace Moretz (Nimona), Riz Ahmed (Ballister Boldheart) and Eugene Lee Yang (Ambrosius Goldenloin).

Netflix has multiple contenders, including the upcoming Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget from Aardman Animation, the multi-Oscar-winning studio behind Wallace & Gromit. This is the comedic sequel to the iconic U.K. studio’s 2000 film Chicken Run — famously pitched as “The Great Escape with chickens” — which remains the highest-grossing stop-motion theatrical release of all time (though it came out before the Academy introduced an animated feature Oscar category). The sequel is helmed by Sam Fell (Flushed Away, ParaNorman) and exec produced by Aardman co-founder Peter Lord.

Netflix’s string of contenders also includes Leo, a coming-of-age musical comedy about the last year of elementary school as seen through the eyes of a 74-year-old lizard voiced by Adam Sandler. The story was written by Robert Smigel, Sandler and Paul Sado.

Universal and Minions studio Illumination Entertainment had the biggest animated hit of the year with The Super Mario Bros. Movie, based on the Nintendo franchise and featuring a voice cast led by Chris Pratt as Mario, which earned a whopping $1.36 billion worldwide and is second only to Barbie on the list of the year’s highest-grossing movies.

On Dec. 22, Universal and Illumination will open Migration, which follows a family of mallards as they embark on an adventure beyond the pond they call home. It’s written by The White Lotus showrunner Mike White and directed by Benjamin Renner, an Oscar nominee in 2014 for his charming Ernest & Celestine. Migration’s voice cast is led by Kumail Nanjiani and Elizabeth Banks, and the film features a score from How to Train Your Dragon composer John Powell.

Meanwhile, DreamWorks Animation and Universal recently released Trolls Band Together, the third film of the musical franchise. In this outing, Poppy (Anna Kendrick) discovers that Branch (Justin Timberlake) was once part of — what else — her favorite boy band. New members of the voice cast include Troye Sivan, Eric André, Daveed Diggs, Kid Cudi, Amy Schumer and Andrew Rannells. Walt Dohrn returns as director.

DreamWorks Animation’s lineup also includes Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, helmed by Oscar-nominated director Kirk DeMicco (The Croods). Toni Collette voices Ruby’s mother and Jane Fonda her grandmother.

Also on the studio side, Paramount and Nickelodeon entered the race with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, a stylized reboot helmed by Jeff Rowe (a writer and director of The Mitchells vs. The Machines), who co-wrote the Turtles screenplay with Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit. The feature brought in $180 million worldwide.

Additional contenders include animated period film The Peasants, from Loving Vincent directors DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, which had its world premiere at TIFF, and Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume (Crunchyroll/Sony Pictures), which premiered
last February in Berlin. The latter film follows a 17-year-old and is set in various disaster-stricken locations across Japan.

This story first appeared in a November standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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