Oct 16, 2015

Judging for the Academy Awards begins this weekend.

The Academy Awards season has officially arrived. Tomorrow, for two days, the Academy's Jury for Animated Short Films and Feature Films will be in Los Angeles to review all eligible films in the Best Animated Short Film category. The following weekend, Academy members in New York will do the same.

This voting will result in a short list of 10 films to be announced in November, followed by a second round of voting to determine the five nominees.

Cartoon Brew has been tracking award-eligible short films for a year with its own awards tracker, the first resource for the animation community. Today, we have made its final update. Two short films have been selected for the awards: the French short "Au fil de l'eau" by Dominique Montferry, director of the Disney film "Destino," and "Stripy" by brothers Babak and Benoud Nekouei, one of the few Iranian shorts to have qualified.

Eligible films were compiled from the Academy's own list of eligible festival awards (available in this PDF) and by asking individual filmmakers directly if they had completed the week-long theatrical screening process in Los Angeles.

The list currently contains 55 films, which is pretty close to last year's 58. But here's the thing: qualifying by winning an award at a festival does not necessarily mean that the filmmaker has completed the required credentialing process. On the other hand, since a filmmaker can qualify for the aforementioned one-week theatrical run, it is possible that other films not on the list also qualified. In such cases, we must rely on individual filmmakers to contact us directly.

Even with these caveats, we believe this list of films is as accurate as possible and includes all of the major contenders in the category this year. We also hope that by making this list available to the public, we can showcase the diversity and quality of the animated short films produced each year and bring more attention to this often overlooked section of the Academy Awards.