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Travis Knight, the CEO of Laika, the animation house behind “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” can’t shake a moment from an Oscars Nominees Luncheon in 2020.
The 52-year-old son of Nike co-founder Phil Knight was there because
his stop-motion film “Missing Link” was up for best animated feature. Across the table sat a screenwriter he had long admired, and the two struck up a conversation. When Knight mentioned his movie, the writer replied: “Oh, I don’t watch any of that stuff. I just let my kids tell me what to vote for.”
Knight smiled on the outside but fumed within. “I was so deeply outraged,” he recalls. The insult stung because Knight knew it was the industry’s quiet consensus, said out loud: Animation is a babysitter.
That’s the paradox at the center of animation in 2026: The medium has never mattered more to Hollywood’s bottom line. Universal and Illumination’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” became the first film to cross $1 billion worldwide this year. Pixar’s spring release “Hoppers” scored the biggest opening for an original Pixar movie since 2017’s “Coco.” And “Toy Story 5” capped the run with a $160 million domestic launch ($312 million worldwide), the best debut of any film this year and the cornerstone of Pixar’s comeback. It’s currently sitting at $879 million globally heading into its fifth weekend, and is destined to be another billion-dollar movie of 2026.
In the nearly five decades that domestic grosses have been tracked, an animated film has finished the year as the No. 1 release just seven times, beginning with Disney’s “Aladdin” in 1992. Now the medium is having an unprecedented run, with “Inside Out 2” and “Zootopia 2” topping the last two calendar years (a first for animated movies to lead the box office for two consecutive years) and the latter becoming the highest-grossing animated film ever domestically. “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is leading 2026 so far and is the only film to cross $1 billion. Setting aside the 2020 and 2021 pandemic seasons, which emptied theaters of family films, animated features have made up about 20% of the year’s 10 top-grossing releases over the past decade. And yet, the artists who make these movies have rarely felt less valued: In May 2024, Pixar cut 14% of its staff — roughly 175 employees. Netflix restructured its animation unit in 2023, eliminating jobs and halting two films in preproduction.
One animator put it plainly: “You have no idea how frustrating it is to see press release after press release touting how much money our animated film made and how many nominations we got; then [the studio] turns to people who have worked here forever and says, ‘We don’t need you anymore.’”
But some of the medium’s stewards admit the condescension has been partly self-inflicted. “A lot of the world still thinks of animation as films for kids, and we do it to ourselves,” says Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter, who directed Oscar winners “Up,” “Inside Out” and “Soul.” “You look at 90% of the [Hollywood industry’s] movies, and they’re funny, goofy, a little bit like babysitter material. We could step up our game [as an industry].”
Nonetheless, the box office alone should elicit more respect. “If my statistics are correct, ‘Moana 2’ did more business than all the best picture nominees put together last year,” says Jim Morris, Pixar’s president of 21 years. “Animation is propping up a lot of the studios right now.”
He’s right. Last year, the Chinese fantasy “Ne Zha 2,” from Beijing Enlight Pictures, became the first animated film to cross $2 billion globally, and shortly after, Disney’s “Zootopia 2” set an all-time domestic record for the form. That reliability buys freedom: When live-action originals stall, it has been animated franchises filling the multiplexes. That cushion is what lets a studio gamble on anything new.
Guillermo del Toro put it best during his Oscar run for the dark stop-motion reimagining of “Pinocchio” in 2022: “Animation is not a genre; it is a medium.”
The folks at Laika refuse to sell their movies as “animation” in the first place. “We market [our projects] as ‘films,’ and we trust the audience to find them, irrespective of the medium,” says David Burke, Laika’s chief marketing and operations officer. “Our films defy categorization.”
Treating an animated movie like an actual film is the bare minimum to show respect, and far rarer than it should be. When “Wildwood” hits theaters in October 23, it will be distributed by Fathom Entertainment, the event-cinema specialist whose unlikely fit was proven by the re-release of “Coraline” in 2024, which took nearly $56 million worldwide on a 15-year-old film. This could be a potential gamechanger in the distribution model if it succeeds.
So what will it take for one of these movies to win the Academy’s best picture award? Since the animated feature category was created in 2001, it has functioned as both recognition and obstacle, a place to honor the work, but one that keeps it out of the main race. Only three animated films have been nominated for best picture: “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), “Up” (2009) and “Toy Story 3” (2010). The animation community feels that list should be substantially larger.
But filmmakers disagree on the fix. Morris is a voting member of the Academy, and his game plan is to keep getting animation’s writers, designers and cinematographers admitted as voters across the Academy’s craft branches until, he says, their numbers are large enough that “all that stuff won’t matter.”
For Jared Bush, the chief creative officer at Walt Disney Animation Studios, the answer isn’t strategic. “People want to feel something,” Bush says. “The movies that have won that award are movies that made a lot of people emotional, that they felt a kinship with, and resonated for them. I think we just need to keep doing that.”
Illumination founder Chris Meledandri, who’s behind the “Minions and Monsters” and “Super Mario” sequels, rejects the premise of bias. “Historically comedies have had a harder time too,” he says. “But we’ve evolved to a point where a lot of those unstated biases have broken down. There’s a collective appreciation now for the artistry that goes into an animated film.”
Mexican animator Jorge Gutiérrez (“The Book of Life”), however, does not believe an animated film will take the top prize. “I hate to be not optimistic, but I don’t see it ever happening,” he says. “The live-action component is too big. There are too many Academy members. I’m an optimist at heart, but I’m also a pragmatist and a realist. I just don’t see it.”
Let’s hope that one day, the Academy will.
Check out three exclusive images from Laika’s upcoming animated feature “Wildwood” below.
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