Up next? The short—yet sweet—animated films. During tonight’s 91st annual Academy Awards, Bao won the highly coveted Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. The film beat out a slew of worthy nominees, including Animal Behaviour, Late Afternoon, One Small Step and Weekends. The Academy first introduced the Best Animated Short Film category back in 1932, when Walt Disney swept the genre. No, really. Not only did he win the award eight years in a row, but he also holds the record for most wins (15) and nominations (49). Other winners include Dear Basketball, Piper, Bear Story, Feast, Mr. Hublot, Paperman and The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. Now that deserves a standing ovation. RELATED: Oscar Nominations 2019: Here’s Who Made the Cut<doc-sep>VALENCIA, CA -- Everything you need to know about alums of California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and the Oscars: Best Animated Feature nominees Incredibles 2, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Ralph Breaks the Internet were directed or co-directed by CalArts alumni CalArts alumni have won 11 Best Animated Feature Oscars. Box office revenue from films directed by CalArts Character and Experimental Animation Program alumni is more than $46 billion dollars (click here for infographic) This year’s “Calartian” Oscar contenders: Two-time Oscar winner Brad Bird (Ratatouille) helmed Pixar Animation Studios’ Incredibles 2. Looking towards his second Oscar, Rich Moore (Zootopia) co-directed Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Ralph Breaks the Internet. And Bob Persichetti co-directed Sony Pictures Animation’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Past winners: Last year, Coco, co-directed by first-time feature director and CalArts graduate Adrian Molina (with Lee Unkrich), won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Earlier award-winning films from alumni directors include The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007) directed by Brad Bird; Finding Nemo (2003) and Wall-E (2008) by Andrew Stanton; Brave (2012) by alumni duo Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman; Pete Docter’s Up (2009); Frozen by alumnus Chris Buck (with Jennifer Lee and Peter Del Vecho); Inside Out (2015) by Pete Docter (with Jonas Rivera), and Zootopia (2016) by alumnus Rich Moore (with Byron Howard and Clark Spencer). CalArts is ranked #1 one among the Top 50 Animation Programs in the U.S. by Animation Career Review. Its Experimental and Character Animation programs are unrivaled in the world -- educating successive generations of filmmakers who define the industry. California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) has set the pace for educating professional artists since 1970. Offering rigorous undergraduate and graduate degree programs through six schools—Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film/Video, Music, and Theater—CalArts has championed creative excellence, critical reflection, and the development of new forms and expressions. As successive generations of faculty and alumni have helped shape the landscape of contemporary arts, the Institute first envisioned by Walt Disney encompasses a vibrant, eclectic community with global reach, inviting experimentation, independent inquiry, and active collaboration and exchange among artists, artistic disciplines and cultural traditions. Source: California Institute of the Arts<doc-sep>The Best Animated Feature category at the Oscars might as well be called the “Pixar Award.” The trophy has been handed out just 18 times, since the 2002 Oscars ceremony (which honored the films of 2001), when Shrek — yes, Shrek — won. At nine of those 18 ceremonies, Pixar took home the prize, including winning four years in a row, from 2008 to 2011 (for Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, and Toy Story 3). Pixar is also the most recent winner in this category, with Coco as the reigning champion. But there’s a challenger on the horizon. Going into the 2019 Oscars, Sony Pictures Animation’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has won every major precursor award, including a clean sweep of the animation industry’s Annie Awards. Boasting critical plaudits and a long, successful run at the box office, Spider-Verse swooped into the race in December and stole the thunder of Pixar’s Incredibles 2, which also boasted great reviews and an even better box office take, but came out in June and feels a little like old news. (That two superhero movies are squaring off in this category feels like a thing that will never happen in, say, Best Foreign Language Film.) Then, just to complicate things, the Cinema Audio Society’s award for animated sound mixing — which, as awards expert Ben Zauzmer points out, has gone to the winner of the Best Animated Feature Oscar for five out of the last six years, including predicting upset wins for Brave in 2013 and Big Hero 6 in 2015 — went to another movie entirely: Wes Anderson’s stop-motion Isle of Dogs. (That the two awards have lined up like this in the past few years is probably just a coincidence, as the voting bodies for CAS and the Oscars are very different, but hey, anything to make the race more exciting!) Really, all five nominees in 2019’s Best Animated Feature race would make worthy winners, though (to me) Spider-verse stands head and shoulders above the rest. The others are still movies worth watching. Here’s a quick look at each one. It took almost 15 years for writer-director Brad Bird to follow up his marvelously thrilling The Incredibles (which won Best Animated Feature at the 2005 Oscars) with the sequel it all but demanded. As with so many projects launched after their creators had years and years to think about them, Incredibles 2 feels like it has thousands of ideas in its head. Not all of them land, but enough of them do. And the ones that don’t still contribute to a complicated examination of just why our culture is so gaga for superheroes. This sequel reverses the structure of the first film, leaving Mr. Incredible at home with the kids, while Elastigirl goes out to battle evil and further the good name of superheroes (who are still outlawed in the Incredibles universe). The two also meet eerie mirrors of themselves in a brother and sister duo who have ideas about how to create a new world brimming with superheroes. Overstuffed with action sequences, comedic bits, and great character moments, Incredibles 2 somehow brings its seemingly dozen plotlines together into a rousing climax. If it’s not quite at the level of the first film, well, the first film is maybe the best movie Pixar ever made, so ... that’s not really a problem. In short: Watch Incredibles 2 if you love superhero deconstructions, family comedy, or Pixar at its best. Where to watch: Incredibles 2 is available to own and rent in both physical and digital formats. It’s also streaming on Netflix. Wes Anderson’s occasionally delightful, occasionally cumbersome, always eyebrow furrow-inducing Isle of Dogs stands as the aesthetically precise director’s second stop-motion animation film (after 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, which lost at the Oscars to Pixar’s Up). It’s also his tribute to Japanese cinema, it’s set in Japan, and it makes the very odd choice to have the titular dogs (who have been banned from futuristic Japanese society) speak English while the human characters largely speak untranslated, unsubtitled Japanese. If that doesn’t sound like at least a recipe for thinkpieces to you, I don’t know what internet you think this is. Isle of Dogs was the subject of the best film writing of 2018, much of it from Asian-American critics grappling with the movie’s obvious craft but also finding themselves put off by how it unintentionally turned Asian characters into alien outsiders. (See: Mashable’s Angie Han; the Los Angeles Times’s Justin Chang; Karen Han at the Daily Beast.) Anderson’s obvious love of the films of Akira Kurosawa, Hayao Miyazaki, and many, many, many other famous Japanese directors is impossible to ignore. But it’s also hard to ignore what Karen Han dubbed his “cultural tourism.” Even with its weird cultural appropriation aside, the movie is less tightly constructed than many of Anderson’s earlier films (particularly Fantastic Mr. Fox, which plays in similar thematic territory, obviously). But it boasts strong voice work from a massive cast that features everybody from Bryan Cranston to Yoko Ono and — as always with Anderson — a visual design worth getting lost in. So you should definitely check it out. Just be prepared to wrestle with it a bit. In short: Watch Isle of Dogs if you love Wes Anderson or want to check out one of the year’s more fascinating cinematic controversies. Where to watch: Isle of Dogs is available to own and rent in both physical and digital formats. It’s also streaming on HBO. If you are, for some reason, watching the Animated Feature nominees in alphabetical order, then Mirai will serve as a fascinating counterpoint to both Incredibles 2 and Isle of Dogs. Most obviously, this film can be compared to Isle of Dogs. While Mirai is also set in Japan and while it also features a dog as a character (granted, a supporting one), it was actually made by a Japanese filmmaker: Mamoru Hosoda, well known to anime fans for movies like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and The Boy and the Beast. (This is his first Oscar nomination, despite how frequently films from Japan are nominated in this category.) But comparing Mirai to Incredibles 2 is also instructive, because where Incredibles 2 does a dozen things pretty well, Mirai does just one thing very well. It follows a young boy named Kun in the emotionally fraught months after his new baby sister, Mirai, enters his life, as his parents try to juggle the demands of two children, their jobs, and their attention-starved dog. Kun begins to have imaginary-or-are-they visits from figures from his family’s past and future, which help him learn to better understand his own emotional outbursts. There are times when Mirai feels a little samey, even at a short running time of barely 90 minutes. But that’s Hosoda’s design, ultimately. The last 15 minutes of Mirai are so dazzling, on both a technical and a narrative level, that they will make you realize why the rest of the movie fell so readily into the rhythms of a child’s day-to-day life. This is a movie for patient viewers, but trust that you will be richly rewarded. In short: Watch Mirai if you love Calvin & Hobbes (this is high, high praise! ). Where to watch: Mirai is still in theaters, though only a handful at any given time. See when it comes to your city here. It’s indicative of the quality of this category that this terrific sequel to 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph is probably going to struggle to scrounge up votes when Academy voters turn in their ballots. Just 10 to 15 years ago, when the Best Animated Feature category frequently found itself filled with the likes of Shark Tale and Surf’s Up (though the surfing penguin movie is a little underrated — gets dragged offstage by a hook), Ralph would have been an easy winner or strong second. Now, it’s an also-ran. But hopefully you registered the part where I said the movie is “terrific,” because it is.<doc-sep>
Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse wins best animated feature at Oscars 2019 Sony's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse emerged as the biggest superhero in the animated feature film category as it took home the Oscar trophy at the 91st Academy Awards. With its win, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse broke Disney-Pixar's dominance at the Oscars in the category. "There are 800 filmmakers who push boundaries to make people feel powerful and seen. So when we hear somebody's kid watching the movie turn to them and say 'he looks like me' or 'he speaks Spanish', we feel like we have already won," producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller said in the acceptance speech. Look who stopped by the #Oscars Thank You Cam, presented by @Cadillac! Best Animated Feature winners for Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse! #KeepRising pic.twitter.com/o1MjGW7u1N The Academy (@TheAcademy) February 25, 2019 They were joined on the stage by co-producers Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman. Since opening last year in December, the feature created by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, has been widely praised both for its fresh story and visual style. The film, which secured its position at the Oscars following its Golden Globe and Annie Award wins, was nominated in the category alongside Ralph Breaks the Internet, Mirai, Incredibles 2 and Isle of Dogs. Watch the trailer of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse ALSO READ| Oscars 2019: Mahershala Ali named Best Supporting Actor for Green Book ALSO READ| Hannah Beachler wins Oscars 2019 as the best production designer for Black Panther