Ask John: Why Don’t More Anime Films Get Submitted for Oscar Consideration?

Question:
Why are domestic licensors too chickensh*t to submit more anime films for a Best Animated Film Oscar nomination? It was bad enough when Bandai and/or Kadokawa U.S.A. blatantly ignored the opportunity to enter The Girl Who Leapt Through Time for the honor. Now I’ve seen Redline, the Berserk and Madoka movies being omitted from the line-ups, not to mention The Children Who Chase Lost Voices. In Madoka and TGWLTT’s case, those films already had a week theatrical run in L.A. County. So it baffles me even more why they didn’t fill out the paperwork. Does it cost that much to pay an indie theater to put up a film for a few days to qualify? Is this a trend? And in Manga’s case, they claimed on their UK Twitter that even if Redline was nominated, all it would do is boost sales. And that’s a bad thing because…? Do these companies prefer to be low-profile nowadays? Do they no longer care if they reach more people outside of traditional anime fandom? Or did the fact that Summer Wars got snubbed add a sense of cold feet to the domestic industry?

Answer:
I’m not personally involved or affiliated with any distributors that place anime films into theaters, so I don’t have any first-hand or truly verifiable knowledge on this particular subject. I can only hypothesize. So my interpretation is that when Manga Entertainment UK says that nominating an anime film for an Oscar would only “boost sales,” what they literally mean is, “Submitting an anime film that’s not directed by Hayao Miyazaki for Academy Award consideration will only result in a very minor increase in home video sales and either a rejection from Oscar consideration or ultimately an award loss.” Hayao Miyazaki’s Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi won the Academy Award for best animated film in 2002, competing against a relatively weak field of competitors that included Ice Age, Lilo & Stitch, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and Treasure Planet. By 2001 Hayao Miyazaki was already well-respected in Hollywood. His Oscar win propelled his acclaim into mainstream American awareness. However, even today, a dozen years later, Hayao Miyazaki is still likely the only Japanese animated film director that average Americans may possibly recognize by name, and he’s only of the very few active anime directors widely recognized in the Hollywood film production community.

The Academy Awards have always been an insular award. For fifty years the Oscars have been criticized for frequently excluding the most popular mainstream hits. Ironically, Hollywood’s most prestigious film award frequently snubs the movies which contribute the most to supporting the Hollywood film industry. While ostensibly a global award for excellence in cinema, the overwhelming majority of Oscar voters are American, and traditionally the vast majority of nominated films and winners are American. Furthermore, considering the insular nature of the Academy Award voting body, final nominations and Oscar winners are heavily determined by discussion and word-of-mouth among Oscar voters. It’s inevitably natural that American professionals tend to favor both their own works and films that they’re familiar with: films that they’ve discussed and heard their peers praise, films that they’ve seen a lot of buzz and publicity for. Sadly, regardless of their artistic quality, obscure Japanese animated films stand little chance of successfully passing through the gamut of Oscar voter approval in order to reach nomination and even winner status. Small, niche non-Hollywood distributors like San Francisco-based Viz Pictures, Texas-based FUNimation and Sentai Filmworks, and New York-based G-Kids recognize that they don’t have the resources necessary to promote and publicize obscure foreign animated films to Hollywood insiders to a degree that will make those insiders shift their attention away from internally-produced and promoted Hollywood animated films. Furthermore, these small, independent distributors realize that just submitting obscure foreign animated films for Oscar consideration means that the films will have to compete against a dozen or more other animated films just for the right to be nominated for serious Academy Award consideration. For every one animated movie that becomes an Academy Award nominee, there are three or four that didn’t even reach the nomination stage.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ (AMPAS) Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film category was established in 2001. Since that time, 174 feature-length animated films have been submitted for Oscar consideration. Only 15 of those 174 movies have been anime films: Spirited Away in 2002; Millennium Actress, Pokèmon Heroes, and Tokyo Godfathers in 2003; Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence in 2004; Howl’s Moving Castle & Steamboy in 2005; Paprika in 2006; Tekkon Kinkreet in 2007; Sky Crawlers & Sword of the Stranger in 2008; Ponyo in 2009; Summer Wars in 2010; From Up on Poppy Hill & The Mystical Laws in 2012. No anime films were even submitted for consideration in 2001 & 2011. Among those 174 total films submitted for consideration, only 44 have been nominated for a potential Best Animated Film Oscar, and among those 44, only 9 have been anime films. So the statistics can be viewed in opposing ways. Out of 174 films submitted for consideration, only 9 anime movies have ever become finalists for a Best Animated Film Oscar, and only one has ever won the award. However, more than half of the Japanese animated films ever submitted for Oscar consideration have become award finalists. But ultimately the statistics and practical reality do not favor Japanese animated films. American distributors frequently don’t bother submitting anime movies like Redline, Madoka Magica, and Berserk for Academy Award consideration because they’re aware that the probability of any of these films becoming an actual Oscar nominee is slim, and the chance of any of these films beating out domestically produced Hollywood animated films for the Oscar is nearly zero because the Academy Award is not presented based strictly on artistic merit; the award is determined by the subjective votes of the members of AMPAS who are not familiar with obscure, cultish Japanese animated films and are instinctively predisposed to favor movies they’re familiar with and movies which their peers have worked on.

Certainly, while I’d love to see artistically outstanding anime films get the Oscar recognition they deserve, I can’t fault small independent American distributors like Viz, FUNimation, and Sentai for not submitting their films for Oscar consideration because these studios are very aware that anime films are outsiders trying to break into a party that claims that it’s open to everyone but in practical terms isn’t. When small, indie anime distributors spend all of their resources on just acquiring and distributing anime, I understand why they may not want to divert effort and resources to pursuing Oscar nomination when the probability of getting accepted is so small and the probability of winning nearly non-existent.