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Academy Award for best animated feature
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Animated scene from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse showing Spider-Man, in a black and red suit, swinging between cars on a neon-lit city street at night.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Publicity still from the animated movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), which won the Academy Award for best animated feature.

Academy Award for best animated feature

Academy Award
Also known as: Best Animated Feature Film
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What is the Academy Award for best animated feature?

Which animated film has won the most Oscars?

Which movie won the first Oscar for best animated feature?

Academy Award for best animated feature, award presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, located in Beverly Hills, California, U.S. It honors the animated film determined by the academy’s voting members to be the best of a given year. The prize was first awarded in 2002. The winners—a maximum of four individuals, including the primary director and the most important other directors and producers of the film—receive a gold-plated statuette known as an Oscar. The eligibility requirements state that the film must be more than 40 minutes in length and animation must be used in more than 75 percent of the film’s total time. Various animation techniques are accepted, including computer animation, stop-motion, clay animation, and traditional hand-drawn animation.

Illustration of Oscar statuettes with a large gold figure in front and the words 'Who decides?' in bold white letters on a blue banner across the center.
Who Votes For the Oscars?When winners thank “the Academy,” who are they talking about?
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Prior to the introduction of the award, the academy had occasionally honored the creators of animated films with noncompetitive special achievement awards. These include honors given to Walt Disney for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Richard Williams for Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), and John Lasseter for Pixar’s Toy Story (1995). Below is a list of the winning movies and their years of release.

2000s

  • 2001: Shrek
  • 2003: Finding Nemo
  • 2004: The Incredibles
  • 2005: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
  • 2006: Happy Feet
  • 2007: Ratatouille
  • 2008: WALL∙E
  • 2009: Up

2010s

2020s

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen.