The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature is given each year for the best animated film. An animated feature is defined by the academy as a film with a running time of more than 40 minutes in which characters' performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique, a significant number of the major characters are animated, and animation figures in no less than 75 percent of the running time. The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature was first awarded in 2002 for films released in 2001.
Beauty and the Beast is a 1991 American animated musical romantic fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It is based on the 1756 fairy tale by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, in turn an abridged version of the 1740 story by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. The film also incorporates ideas from the 1946 French film directed by Jean Cocteau. The film was directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, and produced by Don Hahn, from a screenplay by Linda Woolverton.
Brother Bear is a 2003 American animated musical fantasy comedy-drama film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It was directed by Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker and produced by Chuck Williams, from a screenplay written by Tab Murphy, Lorne Cameron, David Hoselton, and the writing team of Steve Bencich and Ron J. Friedman. The film stars the voices of Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Suarez, Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, Jason Raize, and D.B. Sweeney. Brother Bear follows an Alaska native boy named Kenai who kills a grizzly bear as retribution for his older brother's death. The Great Spirits, incensed by the unnecessary killing, transform Kenai into a bear himself as punishment. In order to become human again, Kenai travels to a mountain where the Northern lights touch the earth, forging a relationship with a cub named Koda along the way.
Howard Elliott Ashman was an American playwright, lyricist and stage director. He is most widely known for his work on feature films for Walt Disney Animation Studios, for which Ashman wrote the lyrics and Alan Menken composed the music. Ashman has been credited as being a main driving force behind the Disney Renaissance. His work included songs for Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. Tim Rice took over to write the rest of the songs for the latter film after Ashman's death in 1991.
Alan Irwin Menken is an American composer and conductor, best known for his scores and songs for films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and Skydance Animation. Menken's contributions to The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and Pocahontas (1995) won him two Academy Awards for each film. He also composed the scores and songs for Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Newsies (1992), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Home on the Range (2004), Enchanted (2007), Tangled (2010), and Disenchanted (2022), among others. His accolades include winning eight Academy Awards — becoming the second most prolific Oscar winner in the music categories after Alfred Newman, a Tony Award, eleven Grammy Awards, seven Golden Globe Awards, and a Daytime Emmy Award. Menken is one of twenty-one people to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.
Glen Keane is an American animator, director, author and illustrator. As a character animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios for 38 years (1974–2012), he worked on feature films including The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Tarzan and Tangled. He received the 1992 Annie Award for character animation and the 2007 Winsor McCay Award for lifetime contribution to the field of animation. He was named a Disney Legend in 2013, a year after retiring from the studio.
Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS), sometimes shortened to Disney Animation, is an American animation studio that creates animated features and short films for The Walt Disney Company. The studio's current production logo features a scene from its first synchronized sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928). Founded on October 16, 1923, by brothers Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney after the closure of Laugh-O-Gram Studio, it is the longest-running animation studio in the world. It is currently organized as a division of Walt Disney Studios and is headquartered at the Roy E. Disney Animation Building at the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, California. Since its foundation, the studio has produced 62 feature films, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to Wish (2023), and hundreds of short films.
The Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) was a proprietary collection of software, scanning camera systems, servers, networked computer workstations, and custom desks developed by The Walt Disney Company and Pixar in the late 1980s. Although outmoded by the mid-2000s, it succeeded in reducing labor costs for ink and paint and post-production processes of traditionally animated feature films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS). It also provided an entirely new palette of digital tools to the animation filmmakers.
Roger Allers is an American film director, screenwriter, animator, storyboard artist, and playwright. He is best known for co-directing Disney's The Lion King (1994), the highest-grossing traditionally animated film of all time, and for writing the Broadway adaptation of the same name. He also directed Sony Pictures Animation's first feature-length animated film, Open Season (2006) and the animated adaptation of The Prophet.
Will Finn is an American animator, voice actor, storyboard artist, and director.
Donald Paul Hahn is an American film producer who is credited with producing some of the most successful animated films in history, including Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King.
The Magic of Disney Animation was a show and tour located at Disney's Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. A Disney animator would show guests how the characters in Disney animated films were chosen and designed. The attraction closed permanently on July 12, 2015. In December 2015, the building began to be used to house the Star Wars Launch Bay.
Byron P. Howard is an American animator, character designer, story artist, film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is best known as one of the directors of the Walt Disney Animation Studios films Bolt (2008), Tangled (2010), Zootopia (2016), Encanto (2021), and the upcoming Zootopia 2 (2025). He is the first LGBT director to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature twice for his work on Zootopia and Encanto.
The Disney Renaissance was a period from 1989 to 1999 during which Walt Disney Feature Animation returned to producing critically and commercially successful animated films. The ten feature films associated with this period are The Little Mermaid (1989), The Rescuers Down Under (1990), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Mulan (1998), and Tarzan (1999).
Mark Alan Henn is an American animator and film director. His work includes animated characters for Walt Disney Animation Studios films, most notably leading or titular characters and heroines. He served as the lead animator for Ariel in The Little Mermaid (1989), Belle in Beauty and the Beast (1991), Jasmine in Aladdin (1992), Young Simba in The Lion King (1994), the title character in Mulan (1998), and Tiana in The Princess and the Frog (2009). Since all these characters except Simba became Disney Princesses, he came to be known as the "princess guy" around the studio. He directed the short films John Henry (2000) and D.I.Y. Duck (2024). Henn spent a total of 43 years at Walt Disney Animation Studios, from 1980 until his retirement in 2023.
Daniel St. Pierre is an American film director, art director, production designer, voice actor, animator, and musician. For his work in bringing the Deep Canvas technique to the Disney film Tarzan (1999), he received a 1999 Annie Award nomination for Outstanding Individual Achievement for Production Design in an Animated Feature Production.
Waking Sleeping Beauty is a 2009 American documentary film directed by Disney film producer Don Hahn and produced by Hahn and former Disney executive Peter Schneider. The film documents the history of Walt Disney Feature Animation from 1984 to 1994, covering the rise of a period referred to as the Disney Renaissance.
Robert Walker was a Canadian-born American animator who co-directed the Academy Award-nominated Brother Bear with Aaron Blaise.
