Contributor: As today’s Oscar nominations show, Hollywood animation is in creative crisis

Animation is the backbone of the film industry, boosting the global box office year after year. But such consistent success comes at the expense of artistic risk-taking — at least as it relates to the animated features produced by Hollywood studios.

To judge from this morning’s Oscar nominations — and the last few years of winners, including the humbly made “Flow” — the formulas that U.S. animation have come to rely on might be losing their stronghold to more innovative, outside-the-box creators.

Minions from the “Despicable Me” movies and talking animals in countless other CGI movies bring people to theaters, but their financial triumph is hindering animation as an art form in the U.S. That’s because their profitability perpetuates animation’s dismissive status as suited only for families or kids.

In 2025, three of the highest-grossing theatrical releases globally were fully animated (China’s “Ne Zha 2,” Disney’s “Zootopia 2,” and Japan’s “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle”), while two more were hybrid iterations of animated hits from decades past (“Lilo & Stitch,” “How to Train Your Dragon”). Two more of the year-end top-10 titles, “Avatar: Fire and Ash” and “A Minecraft Movie” also use digital animation techniques to bring their worlds to life.

And this week, “Zootopia 2” became the highest-grossing U.S. animated film of all time with $1.7 billion worldwide, surely paving the way for more sequels. The fifth installments of two of the most successful animated franchises, “Toy Story” and “Shrek,” will hit screens in a few months. Betting on already proven properties is an industry standard, but it’s felt more egregious in animation as of late.

When the box office continues to respond so positively to more of the same, what’s the incentive for executives and shareholders to think of animation beyond narratives that cater to young audiences or to consider new, more daring concepts?

Pixar Studios’ “Elio,” though well received by critics despite a complicated birth (the film changed directors late in its production), underperformed in theaters, as have most recent original projects. And while “Zootopia 2” fared well on the critical front, it’s hard not to feel like it’s ultimately a variation on a tried-and-true formula, even if it folds in timely ideas amid its animal puns.

But to compare either of them to this morning’s other nominees is to notice that animation can be at once entertaining, intellectually complex and visually distinct. The two French films included, “Arco” and “Little Amélie or the Character of Rain,” prove that even films suited for young audiences can engage with difficult realities like mortality, loss or issues of global warming and our future as a species. They don’t underestimate their audience.

There’s an aversion in Hollywood’s animation to engage with challenging subject matter or to consider that adult viewers can also find enjoyment in animated projects catered to them. The Disney Renaissance of the ’90s is not only revered for the artistry of its hand-drawn worlds, but because the impeccable craft went hand-in-hand with dramatically charged, rather mature stories. It would be unthinkable for Hollywood to make a film like 1996’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” today and market it as a family picture.

Instead, the studio’s approach to entice adults is to bank on nostalgia: rehashed hybrid productions of animated properties that today’s adults watched as children. On the extremely rare occasion that an animated feature for grown-ups comes to fruition, it’s a streaming-only release, exhibiting the industry’s lack of confidence.

That was the case with Hulu’s gruesome “Predator: Killer of Killers” and Sony Pictures Animation’s hand-drawn “Fixed,” a flawed film but one whose unabashed raunchiness was reminiscent of Ralph Bakshi’s provocative animated works of the ’70s and ’80s.

Though certainly not on the same wavelength, the now ubiquitous phenomenon that is “KPop Demon Hunters” suffered a similar fate at first. The Sony-produced musical saga had a quiet awards-qualifying run in June, but it was only after it organically built an audience on Netflix that it received a more publicized, if still limited theatrical release.

For a long while, the Oscars have been complicit in lowering expectations of Hollywood animation. After years of Walt Disney Animation or Pixar taking the award almost by default (which speaks to the academy membership‘s disinterest in animation beyond the most commercial titles), a shift has occurred lately.

When “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” and Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” won Oscars for their more adult-skewed risks, one could have attributed their victories to those directors’ fan bases. But last year’s win for “Flow,” a Latvian film with no dialogue from a first-time director and distributed in the U.S. by Janus Films, felt like a meaningful sign that perhaps the industry as a whole might be ready to embrace animation with more curiosity.

Adventurous animated features, both thematically and from an aesthetic standpoint, exist almost exclusively outside of this country. In Europe, for example, there are state funds that support the creation of artistically audacious projects. In the U.S., even the most formally bold films, like the genuinely inventive “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” must be tied to popular intellectual property in order to get green-lit.

Even in the face of Hollywood’s timidity, some American independent animators have managed to push their offbeat visions through as features made with limited resources. There’s Julian Glander’s hilarious indictment of gig hustling, “Boys Go to Jupiter,” Dash Shaw’s quirky and unexpected films “Cryptozoo” and “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea,” or the work of perennial indie master Bill Plympton, who last year debuted “Slide,” his latest independently produced animated feature in a body of work unafraid of depicting violence and sex.

In the end, the highest-grossing animated film of all time globally is now “Ne Zha 2,” a breathtaking Chinese action-comedy that appealed to local sensibilities. Its intricate lore, numerous characters, endless battles and long running time might scare off outsiders, yet there’s something defiant about an animated feature unconcerned with its prospects among Western viewers.

If Hollywood studios could think smaller, more niche and more eclectically, the animation industry wouldn’t hinge on the bankability of a few four-quadrant movies, but on a healthy and varied slate of projects targeted at different age groups and interests. Hopefully the journey of “KPop Demon Hunters,” surpassing everyone’s expectations, can teach Hollywood that both audiences and Oscar voters thirst for fresher adventures in animation.