Animated Disney at the Oscars: The List of Winners and More

by Ray Keating

Analysis

DisneyBizJournal.com

February 7, 2020

The first animated movie to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards was Disney’s 1991 Beauty and the Beast.

Disney and then Disney/Pixar led a renaissance in film animation starting with The Little Mermaid in 1989, followed by Beauty and the Beast, and then a string of notable movies, from Aladdin (1992) to Toy Story 2 (1999).

This strong of movies clearly pushed the Academy Awards to introduce the Best Animated Feature in 2002 for the 2001 movie year.

Here are the Disney and Disney/Pixar winners for Best Animated Feature by movie release year:

2003: Finding Nemo

2004: The Incredibles

2007: Ratatouille

2008: WALL-E

2009: Up

2010: Toy Story 3

2012: Brave

2013: Frozen

2014: Big Hero 6

2015: Inside Out

2016: Zootopia

2017: Coco

So, out of the first 18 Best Animated Feature Academy Awards, Disney won 12.

And this year, Toy Story 4 has been nominated. It will square off with How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, I Lost My Body, Klaus, and Missing Link.

That’s all pretty darn impressive. But this shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, at the Academy Awards on February 23, 1939, Walt Disney was presented an honorary Oscar for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was the first feature-length animated film in color and with sound. Yeah, Disney has been at this animated things for a long time.

Ray Keating is the editor, publisher and economist for DisneyBizJournal.com, and author of The Disney Planner 2020: The TO DO List Solution and the Pastor Stephen Grant novels. He can be contacted at  raykeating@keatingreports.com.