Jason

It doesn't do it in my browser or on my phone, so I can't play around with it to try and make it stop.

Just checked: the only time that a winner of the LAFCA failed to recieve a nomination for the Academy Award was 2008, Waltz with Bashir.

Promising sign for Your Name: Runner-up was The Red Turtle. (cc: @eXtacy, @SchumacherFTW)

The United States is actually close to 40% non-white. The United Kingdom is under 15% non-white. Not saying that I'm certain that race is the reason for the disparity in Moana's performance, just that demographic differences make it a plausible explanation. As for Frozen doing well in non-white countries, it's known (from research) that exposure to other races/cultures make it easier to identify with them. So in this context, I think that Anglo-American/European cultural dominance means that even non-whites don't have much trouble identifying with white princesses. I suspect the converse is true as well: that whites living in more diverse places would find it easier to identify with non-white princesses.

There was a graph made a couple years ago that compared the eBay merchandise sales (from May 2013-2014, represented by the size of a circle) against the skin tone/hair colour of Disney princesses: Gizmodo article here. It notes the following: However, it's also worth pointing out that Mulan and Pocahontas didn't even have enough sales on eBay to show up in the original data source used to create the graph. This is completely anecdotal, but Mulan is vastly more popular among my Chinese-Canadian friends and family than she is among my white friends and family. Edit: I'm not personally of the opinion that we should ascribe Moana's OS performance at this point to having a non-white princess. I think it's too early to tell, and even in the long run there are likely to be multiple factors. Just shared the above graph/article to show that this concern is plausible and has been raised before.

In hindsight, "mediocre" turned out to be very generous.

Not sure what you meant by BP at 40% guaranteed level? Anyway, it's very hard for me to imagine Zootopia sneaking in after Inside Out missing a nomination last year. I think it's related to the rule change they instituted in 2011 that requires nominees to achieve a 5% threshold of support from essentially just first-choice support, with very limited opportunity to gain support from down the ballot. (It's super-complicated, but they use modifications to STV to ensure only a small amount of second choice and third choice votes will actually count, and essentially none beyond that.) If Zootopia somehow does manage to meet that bar (colour me surprised), it will be for the reasons you've mentioned. Particularly the political timeliness.

Beauty and the Beast Rogue One La La Land Coco The Red Turtle Sing Hidden Figures Passengers The LEGO Batman Movie Dunkirk

Yes, and Disney's total revenue in that time frame would have been close to $200 billion. Just putting that out there for perspective. I'm not saying the Cars franchise hasn't been helpful to Disney's bottom line. I'm not even saying that no Disney executive has ever suggested to Lasseter that another Cars film would be a good idea. I'm saying that given all the evidence out there that he's been given free artistic reign, given all the evidence suggesting he really is passionate about cars, I think he really wanted to make Cars 2, and didn't have to be pressured to do so.

Or maybe he had a vision that didn't quite come out the way he intended and they ran out of time to make it better? Or maybe he just loves cars so much that he wasn't as critical and objective as he usually is when making other films? Some combination of both? There's an extra in Cars 2 where he provides commentary on the making of the film scene-by-scene. I haven't watched the whole thing, but from the 15 or so minutes I did watch, it was easy to tell how passionate he is about cars and some of the other ideas he put into the film (spy movies). I'm actually pretty damn sure Disney hasn't been pressuring him to make films for merchandising purposes, the whole point of hiring Lasseter was to give him free artistic reign. It's a lot easier for me to believe that he wanted to make a second Cars film because of his own personal passion.

I actually would prefer it if the film manages to portray at least some of the men who doubted Johnston because of prejudice as otherwise decent people. That would almost certainly be closer to the truth. It would also broaden the film's message, because one-dimensional portrayals of racism make it too easy for people to think "well, I'm obviously not like that".

Nah, I'm not expecting a masterpiece either. Just saying it doesn't have to be one. Like sure, you might be expecting more, but this film could be all a young girl needs to be able to imagine herself as a scientist when she otherwise wouldn't.

I saw the trailer for this at Moana. My interest was piqued when it said it based on a true story, although not by enough to guarantee I'd see it in theatres (I'm not a frequent moviegoer). But the friend I was with said she really wanted to see it, so I will be. Looked up the true story behind the film, hope the film does it justice. Good point. I'd add that I don't think we've been inundated with stories of either blacks or women achieving great things in science and technology. Even if the film does nothing to explore racism in depth, it serves the purpose of portraying the real story of a black woman overcoming both race and gender-based prejudice to become a NASA scientist. That's important.

The criticism that a film exists only to sell merchandise always feels a little unfair to me. All big-budget films need to make money, merchandising is often a part of that. Doesn't mean the filmmakers and artists involved aren't trying to make a good film. In the case of the Cars franchise, John Lasseter has a passion for cars; his father was a parts manager at a car dealership, and he has five sons that I imagine he's shared that interest with. I can easily believe he's making these films because he genuinely wants to make them. And even though I'm not a big fan of Cars 2 myself, I have a young nephew who really loves both films as well as the toys. He just so happens to be four years old. If Cars 2 scared him, it didn't stop him from re-watching it ten times.

I think it's worth noting that in four of those seven instances they chose a well-received foreign animated film (two French, two Studio Ghibli). Of the remaining three, two were stop-motion, but The Lego Movie over Big Hero 6 actually breaks pattern in a way because that year had Ernest & Celestine and Song of the Sea to choose from. If the NYFCC voting uses FPTP rather than ranked ballots, it's possible that The Red Turtle and Kubo split votes (ironically enough).

All I could find regarding Waltz With Bashir is that it was disqualified for the Documentary category because of a rule change that required documentaries to be screened in both Los Angeles and New York: Bashir at Center of Oscar Controversy. The same article mentions that it was still eligible for Best Animated Feature, as do a few other sources.

Hmm. Looking through the rule book right now. The Animated Feature or Foreign Language Film rule sections state that films are eligible for other categories as long as they meet the rules of those categories. That being said, Foreign Language Film nominees do become ineligible for awards in future years, even if they delay their US theatrical release until the following year. Also, a Foreign Language Film must have its theatrical release in its home country before the US, but cannot be distributed in any way within the United States before its Los Angeles county qualifying run for other categories. So I can imagine that some previous Foreign Language Films have managed to disqualify themselves. It seems like GKIDS knows the rules though, as far as I can tell Zucchini will be eligible for both categories.

This is the first time I've heard this from someone who (I'm presuming) doesn't natively speak Cantonese.

I think Zootopia, Moana, and Kubo are locks. It's a very strong year for animation with a lot of well-received films from smaller studios, so Finding Dory might not make the cut. My guess is the most likely final pair of nominees will be from among The Red Turtle, My Life as a Zucchini, and Your Name. Trolls, Sausage Party, and Secret Life of Pets almost certainly won't be nominated. There are a total of eleven animated films this year with a higher average rating on RT, which has been a very strong predictor of nominations in the past. You might be interested in the Best Animated Feature thread, a few people have made predictions there. You could start reading from page 20 or so if you're only interested in more recent predictions.

In 2005 Corpse Bride lost to Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Notably, 2006 and 2012-2014 represent four of the six years where there hasn't been a statistically significant leader in RT average rating (among animated films).

Frozen is still very much an outsize cultural phenomenon. My mother works at an elementary school, and kids (Grades 1-3) still talk about it, at least occasionally. (I don't know the context, didn't ask.) Also, when I was shopping at the Disney store this summer, there was a group of kids spamming Frozen songs on some sort of sing-along TV display. Purely anecdotal, I know, but there's also merchandise sales etc. to take into account. If Frozen 2 comes out in the next few years, I can see it beating the original domestically as long as it's good. Internationally it won't, because it's very unlikely to match the original in Japan, and also because of the increased strength of the USD. (Frozen adjusts to about $750M OS, even you take into account ticket price inflation as well as the exchange rate changes.)

That seems like a boldly low prediction to me. Meanwhile, over in the Moana thread: @lmja I found the appropriate thread for you to tell us where you found out that it's "almost certain" Idina Menzel won't be in Frozen 2.

I emphasized "a bit". Without that qualifier, I can understand debating whether a -53% and -43% drop counts as a "beating". With that qualifier, I don't see how you can possibly argue it isn't at least "a bit" of a beating given that Dory dropped less than -24%, -37% its first two weeks, and -40% over the 3-day for the 4th of July long weekend. I agree with Baumer that there was an overreaction to this statement. (I don't necessarily agree it had anything to do with Pixar fandom though, perhaps just poor reading.)

Here's a regional adjustment that includes ticket price inflation as well as the change in USD exchange rate. Will hopefully make it easier to make ticket sale comparisons. Zootopia is adjusted by exchange rate only, since it was released this year. Figures are in US$ millions. (Untracked adjusted gross for Tangled is slightly negative because of the regional estimates adding up to slightly more than the overall adjustment.)