Travis Knight, CEO of Laika, the animation company behind “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” doesn’t let his guard down for a second at the 2020 Oscar nominee luncheon.
The 52-year-old son of Nike co-founder Phil Knight was in attendance because his stop-motion film “Missing Link” was nominated for best animated feature. Across the table from him sat a screenwriter he had long admired, and the two struck up a conversation. When Knight mentioned his movie, the writer responded, “Oh, I don’t watch that. I just let my kids tell me what to vote for.”
Knight was smiling on the surface, but on the inside he was angry. “I was very angry,” he recalls. Mr. Knight exclaimed that the insult stung because he knew it was the unspoken consensus of the industry. “Animation is a babysitter.”
This is the contradiction at the heart of animation in 2026. Animation has never been more important to Hollywood’s bottom line. Universal and Illumination’s “Super Mario Galaxy Movie” became the first film to surpass $1 billion worldwide this year. Pixar’s spring release “Hoppers” had the biggest opening for a Pixar original film since 2017’s “Coco.” Toy Story 5 closed with $160 million in domestic box office revenue ($312 million worldwide). It was the best debut of any film this year and was the cornerstone of Pixar’s resurgence. It has now grossed $879 million worldwide heading into its fifth weekend, and is expected to become another billion-dollar movie in 2026.
In nearly 50 years of tracking domestic box office sales, only seven times since Disney’s 1992’s “Aladdin” has an animated film been the No. 1 release of the year. The medium is currently enjoying an unprecedented run, with Inside Head 2 and Zootopia 2 topping the list for the past two calendar years (the first animated film to top the box office in two consecutive years), with the latter becoming the highest-grossing animated film of all time domestically. “Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is leading 2026 so far and is the only movie to top $1 billion. Excluding the pandemic season of 2020 and 2021, when movie theaters emptied for family movies, animation films have accounted for about 20% of the top 10 grossing films of the year over the past decade. Still, the artists who make these films rarely feel so unappreciated. In May 2024, Pixar cut 14% of its staff, or approximately 175 employees. Netflix will reorganize its animation department in 2023, cut staff and cancel two films in pre-production.
As one animator put it plainly, “You have no idea how frustrating it is to see press release after press release trumpeting how much money our animated films have made and how many nominations they’ve gotten, and then[the studios]turn to the people who’ve been working here all their lives and say, ‘We don’t need you anymore.'”
But some media managers admit that some of this condescension is self-inflicted. “A lot of people in the world still think of animation as children’s movies, but we’re doing it ourselves,” said Pete Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer who directed the Oscar-winning films “Up,” “Inside Head” and “Soul.” “If you look at 90% of the movies[in the Hollywood industry]they’re funny, goofy, a little bit like The Babysitter. Maybe we can step up our game[as an industry].”
Nevertheless, the box office numbers alone should earn it more respect. “If my statistics are correct, Moana 2 did more box office than all of last year’s Best Picture nominees combined,” says Jim Morris, Pixar’s president for 21 years. “Animation is the backbone of many studios today.”
Woody and Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story 5
pixar
He’s right. Last year, Beijing Enright Pictures’ Chinese fantasy “Ne Zha 2” became the first animated film to surpass $2 billion worldwide, shortly followed by Disney’s “Zootopia 2,” which set the format’s all-time domestic record. That reliability buys freedom. As live-action originals stall, animated series are filling multiplexes. That cushion allows studios to bet on something new.
“Animation is not a genre, it’s a medium,” said Guillermo del Toro, who won an Oscar nomination for the dark, stop-motion 2022 remake of “Pinocchio.”
“Wild Wood”
The Laika staff refuses to market their films as “animation” in the first place. “We market[our projects]as ‘movies,’ and we believe that audiences will find them regardless of the medium,” says David Burke, Leica’s chief marketing and operations officer. “Our films defy categorization.”
Treating an animated film like a real movie is the least you can do to show respect, and it’s more rare than it should be. When Wildwood opens in theaters on October 23rd, it will be distributed by event cinema specialist Fathom Entertainment, but that is unlikely, as evidenced by the 2024 re-release of Coraline, which cost nearly $56 million worldwide for the 15-year-old film. If successful, this could revolutionize the distribution model.
So what does it take for these films to win the Academy Award for Best Picture? Ever since the Animated Feature category was created in 2001, the category has served as both a platform to celebrate films and a place to keep them out of the competition, both visibility and a roadblock. Only three animated films have been nominated for Best Picture: “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), “Up” (2009) and “Toy Story 3” (2010). The animation community believes the list needs to be expanded significantly.
However, the filmmakers disagree with this amendment. Mr. Morris is a voting member of the Academy, and his strategy is to keep animation writers, designers and cinematographers recognized as voters across the Academy’s craft branches until their numbers grow enough that “it doesn’t matter.”
For Jared Bush, chief creative officer at Walt Disney Animation Studios, the answer isn’t strategic. “People want to feel something,” Busch said. “The films that won that award are the ones that touched a lot of people, that were relatable, that resonated with a lot of people. I think we have to continue to do that.”
Chris Meledandri, founder of Illumination, the company behind Minions & Monsters and the Super Mario sequels, rejects the biased premise. “Historically, comedy has also had more difficult times,” he says. “But we have evolved to the point where many of those unstated biases have been broken down. We now collectively appreciate the artistry that goes into animated films.”
But Mexican animator Jorge Gutierrez (The Book of Life) doesn’t think an animated film will win the top prize. “I hate to be optimistic, but I don’t think we can be optimistic,” he says. “There’s too much live action. There’s too many Academy members. I’m an optimist at heart, but I’m also a realist and realist. I just don’t get it.”
Let’s hope the Academy does the same someday.
Check out three exclusive images from Laika’s upcoming animated feature “Wildwood” below.
