Mar 1, 2017

Academy members do not care about anime: 2017 Edition

Disney's Zootopia won the Academy Award for best animated feature this year, marking the ninth time in ten years that the Walt Disney Company has won the award.

Is there some kind of conspiracy that keeps allowing Disney to win the award- Probably not, at least not in our opinion.

The more likely culprit is good old-fashioned ignorance. Giving the award to the company with the biggest footprint in the industry is an unsurprising choice for voters who have no passion for animated filmmaking and no knowledge of the craft.

The Academy, at last count, had 6,687 members. There's ballpark 500-600 people who are members of the Academy's short films and feature animation branch. The remaining 6,000-plus members who decide the winner of the feature animation Oscar have little connection to the animation field. It has proven itself to be a recipe for disaster.

For the last few years, The Hollywood Reporter has interviewed members of the Academy anonymously to find out how they voted in various categories. Each year (see 2014 or 2015), the “Brutally Honest Oscar Voter Ballot” participants have shown a dismissive attitude toward animation, but more than mere attitude, they've also shown themselves uniquely unqualified to judge animated filmmaking, often expressing contempt for the art form and viewing it as a lesser craft than what they produce in live action.

Such views echo the stories that I have personally heard from reliable sources about how some Academy members outsource the animated feature voting process to their children, allowing their kids to watch the nominated films and report back with their favorites. The Reporter interviews make clear that such situations may be more widespread than anyone could have imagined.

The non-animation Academy members in these interviews are often openly hostile to the art form, and even when they try to discuss the films, they talk about them in terms of personal preference, not through discussing the creative and artistic merits of the productions.

If the feature animation Oscar hasn't yet lost its prestige in the public's eye, I can attest that many in the international animation community no longer view the Academy Award as a legitimate indicator of excellence in animated filmmaking. Rewarding the same corporation with an award for nearly an entire decade has had a clear and pronounced effect on how the award is perceived by the animation world outside of Los Angeles.

In fact, across the Atlantic, major animation producers have banded together and are preparing to launch a Pan-European alternative, the European Animation Emile Awards.

While some European countries already have film awards, like the U.K.'s BAFTAs, France's César Awards, and Spain's Goyas, the Emile Awards have the potential to build real prominence because they allow submissions from all of those countries, plus the rest of Europe. Further, the voting is guaranteed to be done by people who actually have an appreciation and understanding about the films that they're judging.

The Academy may be a group of industry professionals, but they have proven themselves to be anything but professional when it comes to judging animation. Their flippant attitude and outright disdain for the art form has led to a crisis of confidence in the organization's abilities to judge animation, and there is no indication that the Academy plans to implement new procedures that addresses their general membership's disinterest in animation craft.

Below are the opinions of six more Academy members from this year's “Brutally Honest” ballots feature of The Hollywood Reporter:

On animated features:

On animated shorts:

On animated features:

On animated shorts:

On animated features:

On animated shorts:

On animated features:

On visual effects:

On animated shorts:

On animated features:

On visual effects:

On animated shorts:

On animated features:

On visual effects:

On animated shorts: