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.
The Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film is an award for documentary films. In 1941, the first awards for feature-length documentaries were bestowed as Special Awards to Kukan and Target for Tonight. They have since been bestowed competitively each year, with the exception of 1946. Copies of every winning film are held by the Academy Film Archive.
Rain Man is a 1988 American road comedy-drama film directed by Barry Levinson and written by Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass. It tells the story of abrasive, selfish, young wheeler-dealer Charlie Babbitt, who discovers that his estranged father has died and bequeathed virtually all of his multimillion-dollar estate to his other son, Raymond, an autistic savant of whose existence Charlie was unaware. Charlie is left with only his father's beloved vintage car and rosebushes. Valeria Golino also stars as Charlie's girlfriend, Susanna. Morrow created the character of Raymond after meeting Kim Peek, a real-life savant; his characterization was based on both Peek and Bill Sackter, a good friend of Morrow who was the subject of Bill, an earlier film that Morrow wrote.
Richard Edmund Williams was a Canadian-British animator, voice actor, and painter. A three-time Academy Award winner, he is best known as the animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) -- for which he won two Academy Awards -- and as the director of his unfinished feature film The Thief and the Cobbler (1993). His work on the short film A Christmas Carol (1971) earned him his first Academy Award. He was also a film title sequence designer and animator. Other works in this field include the title sequences for What's New Pussycat? (1965) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) and title and linking sequences in The Charge of the Light Brigade and the intros of the eponymous cartoon feline for two of the later Pink Panther films. In 2002 he published The Animator's Survival Kit, an authoritative manual of animation methods and techniques, which has since been turned into a 16-DVD box set as well as an iOS app. From 2008 he worked as artist in residence at Aardman Animations in Bristol, and in 2015 he received both Oscar and BAFTA nominations in the best animated short category for his short film Prologue.
Ronald Steven Suskind is an American journalist, author, and filmmaker. He was the senior national affairs writer for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000, where he won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for articles that became the starting point for his first book, A Hope in the Unseen. His other books include The Price of Loyalty, The One Percent Doctrine, The Way of the World, Confidence Men, and his memoir Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism, from which he made an Emmy Award-winning, Academy Award-nominated feature documentary. Suskind has written about the George W. Bush administration, the Barack Obama administration, and related issues of the United States' use of power.
Donald Paul Hahn is an American film producer who is credited with producing some of the most successful animated films in recent history, including Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King.
Autistic art is artwork created by autistic artists that captures or conveys a variety of autistic experiences. According to a 2021 article in Cognitive Processing, autistic artists with improved linguistic and communication skills often show a greater degree of originality and attention to detail than their neurotypical counterparts, with a positive correlation between artistic talent and high linguistic functioning. Autistic art is often considered outsider art. Art by autistic artists has long been shown in separate venues from artists without disabilities. The works of some autistic artists have featured in art publications and documentaries and been exhibited in mainstream galleries. Although autistic artists seldom received formal art education in the past, recent inclusivity initiatives have made it easier for autistic artists to get a formal college education. The Aspergers/Autism Network's AANE Artist Collaborative is an example of an art organization for autistic adults.
Jorge R. Gutierrez is a Mexican-American animator, writer, producer, director, painter, and voice actor. He co-created with Sandra Equihua the Nickelodeon animated series El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, co-wrote and directed The Book of Life, Son of Jaguar for Google, and Maya and the Three for Netflix Animation.
Byron P. Howard is an American animator, character designer, story artist, film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is best known as the director of the Walt Disney Animation Studios films Bolt (2008), Tangled (2010), Zootopia (2016), and Encanto (2021). 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. These were mostly musical adaptations of well-known stories, similar to the films produced during the era of Walt Disney from the 1930s to 1960s. The resurgence allowed Disney's animated films to become a powerhouse of successes at the domestic and foreign box office, earning much greater profits than most of the Disney films of previous eras.
Cartoon Saloon is an Irish animation film, short film and television studio based in Kilkenny which provides film TV and short film services. The studio is best known for its animated feature films The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, The Breadwinner and Wolfwalkers. Their works have received five Academy Award nominations, their first four feature length works all received nominations for Best Animated Feature and one for Best Animated Short Film. The company also developed the cartoon series Skunk Fu!, Puffin Rock, Dorg Van Dango and Viking Skool. As of 2020, the studio employs 300 animators.
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.
The Sweatbox is a 2002 American documentary film directed by Trudie Styler, which documents the production of the Walt Disney Pictures film The Emperor's New Groove. Utilizing behind-the-scenes footage and interviews, it illustrates the slow and painful transformation of the original version of the film to the finished product, with a focus on Sting's work on the soundtrack. The documentary's major theme is creative-executive conflicts.
Roger Ross Williams is an American director, producer and writer and the first African American director to win an Academy Award (Oscar), with his short film Music by Prudence; this film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film in 2009.
Tom Sito is an American animator, animation historian and teacher. He is currently a Professor at USC's School of Cinematic Arts in the Animation Division. In 1998, Sito was included by Animation Magazine in their list of the One Hundred Most Important People in Animation.
The Red Turtle is a 2016 animated fantasy drama film directed by Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit who co-wrote the film with French screenwriter Pascale Ferran. The film is an international co-production between Studio Ghibli and several French companies, including Wild Bunch and Belvision. The film, which has no dialogue, tells the story of a man who becomes shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and meets a giant red female turtle.
O.J.: Made in America is a 2016 American documentary, produced and directed by Ezra Edelman for ESPN Films and their 30 for 30 series. It was released as a five-part miniseries and in theatrical format. O.J.: Made in America premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 22, 2016, and was theatrically released in New York City and Los Angeles in May 2016. It debuted on ABC on June 11, 2016, and aired on ESPN.
Loop is a 2020 American animated drama short film directed and written by Erica Milsom with the story being written by Adam Burke, Matthias De Clercq and Milsom, produced by Pixar Animation Studios, and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. It is the sixth short film in Pixar's SparkShorts program and focuses on a non-verbal autistic girl and a chatty boy, learning to understand each other. The short was released on Disney+ on January 10, 2020.
Flee is a 2021 independent adult animated documentary film directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen. An international co-production with Denmark, France, Norway, and Sweden, it follows the story of a man under the alias Amin Nawabi, who shares his hidden past of fleeing his home country of Afghanistan to Denmark for the first time. Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau serve as executive producers and narrators for the English-language dub version.
