KPop Demon Hunters may have been golden, but 2025 was otherwise a famously dire year for Best Animated Feature contenders, particularly among American studios. Decidedly mediocre offerings like Paramount’s Smurfs and The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants, DreamWorks’ Dog Man and The Bad Guys 2, and Briarcliff’s Sneaks failed to stir the interest of audiences or Academy voters.
Even Pixar saw its star fall as its would-be summer blockbuster Elio debuted to middling reviews and box office. While that film ultimately managed to eke out a nomination, it felt like something of a pity nod for a studio that seemed in crisis mode amid larger Mouse House concerns.
With apologies to Darth Vader, 2026 is shaping up to be the year where American animation strikes back. Pixar alone has Toy Story 5 and Hoppers in contention, and the studio’s former Oscar champ, Brad Bird, is taking fans back to the future with his world of tomorrow-set noir, Ray Gunn.
Meanwhile, the stop-motion wizards at Laika are winning raves for their latest feature, Wildwood; DreamWorks hopes that voters will love the Filipino folklore-inspired Forgotten Island more than viewers did; and Universal is betting that all those Charlie Chaplin gags in Minions & Monsters will scratch the Academy’s itch for Hollywood nostalgia. Still on deck is Walt Disney’s annual Thanksgiving offering, Hexed, and Warner Animation’s trip to Seussville, The Cat in the Hat.
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We’ve been here before, though. Two years ago at the 2025 Oscar ceremony, Disney’s Inside Out 2 and DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot were neck-and-neck for yet another Hollywood victory until a little cartoon cat from Latvia stole their thunder.
Gints Zilbalodis’ silent eco-fable Flow made plenty of noise when it emerged as the upset Best Animated Feature champ; besides being only the fourth international animated feature to claim the prize — after Spirited Away in 2002, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in 2005, and The Boy and the Heron in 2023 — it was also the first winner not to hail from an established global animation powerhouse like Japan’s Studio Ghibli or the United Kingdom’s Aardman Animations. (Aardman is back in the hunt this year with its latest Shaun the Sheep comedy, The Beast of Mossy Bottom, which could bring the series its third nomination.)
This year’s crop of animated contenders features several international productions hailing from smaller animation houses that would love to be the next Flow. As it happens, four of the likeliest candidates used the Toronto International Film Festival as an awards season springboard after earning raves out of summertime events like Cannes and the animation-focused Annecy Festival. Those titles include Iron Boy and In Waves from France, The Violinist from Singapore, and Tangles from Canada, all of which Gold Derby sampled during our time at TIFF.
But there are some other potential international contenders Flowing toward the Oscar race as well. Here’s how we’d rank the chances of the indie international titles that we’ve already screened — with more to come.
While the horror trio of Iron Lung, Obsession, and Backrooms largely defined this year’s YouTube-to-multiplex pipeline, The Amazing Digital Circus is more than a mere footnote in that trend. The blockbuster YouTube ‘toon from Down Under enjoyed a $20 million opening weekend for the Fathom Entertainment-overseen theatrical release of its feature-length series finale. Not bad for a nine-chapter story that was made independently over the course of three years by the Australian animator, Gooseworx, and the digital media company, Glitch Productions, and captured the hearts and minds of a very online Gen Z audience.
At the time, Fathom’s outgoing CEO, Ray Nutt, told us that the company would be involved in an Oscar campaign should Circus‘ makers decide to pursue one. But since Fathom is also releasing Wildwood in partnership with Laika, that significantly pricier film is likely taking pole position in their awards circuit lane. That, coupled with the fact that your appreciation of The Last Act hinges heavily on having followed what’s happened before, makes the finale unlikely to follow Obsession through the YouTube-to-Oscars pipeline.
Originally commissioned by and displayed at Italy’s famed Fondazione Prada, directors Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani turned their Blender-rendered documentary-fiction hybrid into a feature that traveled the festival circuit until Film Movement booked it into theaters. Inspired by Bennani’s own relationship with her mother, the film splits its time between Brooklyn and Casablanca and features a blend of languages in its presentation of an artist exploring the limits of her creativity and identity.
Bouchra arrives five years after Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee became the first documentary to receive a Best Animated Feature nod, along with nominations for Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature. (It ended up going 0-for-3 on Oscar night.) But that film was also part of a larger story about global refugeeism that was top of mind at the time; Bouchra has an interior narrative and a distinct animation style that may not translate beyond a narrower audience.
4. In Waves (Nov. 27)
One of two autobiographical graphic novel-to-screen translations in contention this year, In Waves adapts AJ Dungo’s 2019 memoir about finding and losing his first love, who introduced him to her passion — surfing. Produced by the French animation house, Silex Films, and directed by Vietnamese-born animator Phuong Mai Nguyen, the film was acquired by Netflix following its Cannes premiere and the streamer enlisted Stephanie Hsu and Will Sharpe to voice the English-language version.
The reach (and deep pockets) offered by Netflix will certainly benefit In Waves as it seeks an awards season current that could carry it into Oscar contention. But the streamer will be balancing this delicately made, highly-emotional love story with the whiz-bang retro-futurism of Ray Gunn, and the A-list cast and director associated with that project could eclipse this one. In Waves is also similar in source material and subject matter to Tangles and voters may have room in their hearts for only one tear-wrenching story of love and loss.
3. The Violinist (TBD)
This year’s winner of Annecy’s prize for Best Film, The Violinist tracks the decades-spanning story of two childhood friends and skilled violinists separated by World War II and its aftermath. Co-directed by Disney veteran Raúl GarcÃa and Ervin Han, the film plays like the lushly animated — although, at times, dramatically stiff — version of an international prestige period piece that a specialty label like Miramax or Sony Pictures Classics might have released stateside in the 1990s and navigated to a couple of Oscar nods. Think along the lines of Indochine, Il Postino, or Farewell My Concubine.
While The Violinist is currently seeking U.S. distribution, Gold Derby has confirmed with the film’s reps that it will be submitted for Best Animated Feature consideration at the 2027 Oscars. Comparisons could be drawn to previous nominees like Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises and Nora Twomey’s The Breadwinner, two overseas features that explored the lingering effects of war on the psyche of their central characters and distant country. It could similarly appeal to Academy voters looking for alternatives to the kiddie fare dominating American studio offerings.
2. Tangles (Jan. 15)
Originally published in 2010, Sarah Leavitt’s graphic novel recounts the six-year span that separated her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and her eventual passing. The artist’s spare black-and-white illustrations provide the template for animator Leah Nelson’s lovingly-crafted hand-drawn debut feature, which counts Canadian cinematic royalty like Seth and Lauren Miller Rogen and Evan Goldberg among the creative team, and Abbi Jacobson and Julia Louis-Dreyfus heading up a star-studded cast that includes Bryan Cranston and Bowen Yang.
And yes, all of those actors are allowed to be funny. Despite the difficult subject matter — which admittedly could prove to be a hurdle that some viewers don’t feel ready to leap over — Tangles is packed with spiky verbal and visual humor that enhances each and every emotional beat. Currently ranked at No. 6 on our experts-only leaderboard, it’s the international feature most likely to benefit if the bubble pops on a bigger movie like Ray Gunn or Hoppers.
1. Iron Boy (Jan. 22)
Sitting at No. 3 on our leaderboard, Iron Boy is first among the international offerings competing for a Best Animated Feature berth, and it’s not hard to see why. Louis Clichy’s painterly coming of age story looks and feels like a Gallic Peanuts strip and the central character, Christophe, is certainly as put-upon as good ol’ Charlie Brown. Forced into an iron corset to correct his perpetually-leaning body, the 11-year-old also has to contend with his father’s failing farm and his first stirrings of love — not for a little red-haired girl, but a cool mischief-maker.
A former Pixar employee who worked on back-to-back Oscar-winners WALL-E and Up — part of the studio’s four-statuette streak from 2007 to 2010 — Clichy successfully marries a specificity of time and place with themes and characters that can easily cross borders. (Sony Pictures Classics notably hasn’t announced plans for an English-language dub, a sign of confidence that the subtitled version will engage audiences of all ages.) If Toy Story 5 and Wildwood can’t marshal a clear majority, votes could very well Flow toward Iron Boy.
