6 pieces
Adam Elliot's second stop-motion feature took eight years to make and collected festival prizes from Annecy to Annapurna. The Australian argument is that his particular strain of misery-claymation is one of the country's more unusual exports.
Gints Zilbalodis made a dialogue-free animated feature in Blender with a team of a dozen, won the Oscar, and put the Latvian film industry on the global animation map. The patient argument is that the form, not the novelty, is the achievement.
A Latvian animated feature made on Blender with a team of fifteen people won the Oscar and beat DreamWorks, Pixar, and Netflix. The reason is not budget. It is silence.
Morgan Neville's LEGO-animated Pharrell Williams biography arrived in October 2024 as a formal provocation: a documentary rendered in plastic bricks. The film solves a specific genre problem, and creates a different one.
Chris Sanders' adaptation of Peter Brown's novel is the best animated feature of the year and an argument for DreamWorks doing specifically what Pixar has stopped doing.
Pixar's ninth sequel turns out to be, surprisingly, one of the studio's best films in a decade. An argument for the animation that grew up with its audience.