Anime Gets Snubbed (Yet Again) by The Academy Awards

As anime continues to grow in popularity, it’s also beginning to break through into general pop culture even more. Although fans of the medium know about some of anime’s best films are well deserving of awards recognition, it’s been pretty hard for anime to get an actual nomination for The Academy Awards, let alone secure a win. This unfortunately is the case for the 2020 awards as the list of nominations for each category was announced earlier, and it confirmed that there will be no anime feature films vying for one of the top honors.

Complete shout outs like this have been deemed “snubs” by those following the awards season scene, and the list of nominations for the Best Animated Film and Best International Film categories lacked any anime films that were submitted for this category. Meaning no love for Makoto Shinkai’s latest, Weathering With You, among other notable entries.

The nominations for Best Animated Film break down as such:

• How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
• I Lost My Body
• Klaus
• Missing Link
• Toy Story 4

Notable anime films that were submitted for nominations in this category include the aforementioned Weathering With You, Ayumu Watanabe’s Children of the Sea, Hiroyuki Imaishi’s Promare, and Kitaro Kousaka’s Okko’s Inn among a few others. Weathering With You was especially notable as Japan also submitted it to the International Feature Film category (marking it the first anime film since Princess Mononoke to get the honor), but it failed to make the shortlist.

Weathering With You was a major hit in Japan when it released last Summer, and soon it will be making its debut in the United States, so the lack of a nomination for even the leading film in anime to get some sort of recognition definitely stings. This is doubly so following Makoto Shinkai’s previous film, Your Name, not getting any notable recognition from the Academy Awards either.

But given that it’s sort of a closed off popularity contest, with members of the Academy being individuals in Hollywood that don’t really reveal their identities to the public, the lack of anime nominations is not quite surprising. Many genre films fail to win these accolades, but thankfully there will be fan support and other kinds of recognition behind great anime feature films.

Does the lack of anime film nominations bother you? What films did you want to see nominated for an Academy Award? Let us know your thoughts in the comments or talk to me directly about all things anime and other cool things @Valdezology on Twitter!