Disney & Pixar Shut Out of Annie Awards’ Top Prize For First Time

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The Annie Awards, the animation world’s top prize, introduced its Best Animated Feature award in 1992. And in the 30+ years since, there has always been at least one animated movie from either Disney or Pixar nominated for that Best Animated Feature prize. In many years, there were multiple Disney/Pixar nominees in the category.

Until 2024. For the first time in the award’s history, neither Disney nor Pixar have a nominee for Best Animated Feature at the Annie Awards. That’s despite the companies releasing several contenders last year, including Disney’s Wish and Pixar’s Elemental.

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Instead, the Annies nominated the following five films for Best Animated Feature:

Nimona
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Suzume
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
The Boy and the Heron

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast was the very first winner of the Annie’s Best Animated Feature award. The fact that at least one Disney or Pixar film was nominated every single year from then until now speaks to the company’s impressive track record and creative consistency.

Unfortunately, it also speaks to how rough a 2023 Disney had. Elemental did eventually turn into a modest hit for Pixar, but it also got extremely mixed reviews; it was the first Pixar film I’ve ever given a negative review here on ScreenCrush. But at least Elemental didn’t wind up on my list of 2023’s worst films. Wish did, thanks to its forgettable songs and rehashed storyline.

It’s now been three years since a Pixar film won the Annie for Best Animated Feature; it last happened in 2020 when Pixar’s Soul beat the studio’s Onward, as well as DreamWorks’ The Croods: A New Age and Trolls World Tour and Netflix’s The Willoughbys. The last Disney movie that topped the Annies was 2016’s Zootopia.

Last year’s Annie Award for Best Animated Feature went to Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, which also won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. This year’s Annie Award winners will be announced on February 17 at UCLA’s Royce Hall.