Final voting is February 11-18. The 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2 and air live on ABC at 7 p.m. ET/ 4 p.m. PT. We update our picks through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions.
The State of the Race
“The Wild Robot” has further momentum for Best Animated Feature after grabbing two additional Oscar nominations for score (Kris Bowers) and sound. This is a first for DreamWorks Animation. However, the sci-fi adventure is in a very tight race with indie sensation “Flow,” which also secured a Best International Feature nomination for Latvia. “Flow” is on a roll of its own, capturing prizes from the Golden Globes, the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the European Film group. After last year’s win for Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron,” it’s clear that the Academy’s international voting bloc has become increasingly more influential.
“The Wild Robot,” one of the best films ever from DreamWorks (adapted from Peter Brown’s illustrated book), finds robot Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) washed ashore on an uninhabited island. She must adapt and live among the animals, eventually adopting the orphaned gosling bird Brightbill (Kit Connor). DreamWorks embraces an impressionistic 2D aesthetic (inspired by Tyrus Wong’s legendary watercolor backgrounds in “Bambi” and Miyazaki’s lush forests) that’s the most impressive hand-drawn stylization since the influential “Spider-Verse.” Thanks to new tech, DreamWorks hand-painted all of the environments as mattes while also applying 2D textures and shaders to Roz and the various animals. The more time Roz spends in the wild, the more her surface changes with dents, scratches, mildew, and mold. She quickly becomes a hand-painted surface, blending in with the animals and the wilderness.
“Flow” is a sublime, dialogue-free adventure from director Gints Zilbalodis (“Away”). It’s about an earth inhabited by animals forced to overcome their differences to survive a great flood. It focuses on a black cat that shares a boat with a capybara, lemur, stork, and golden retriever. Animated in the open-source Blender with its real-time engine, the CG animals have a soft quality, while the environments are sharper. Zilbalodis achieves an immersion with his roving camera and is served well by his animation team based in Latvia, France, and Belgium.
“Inside Out 2,” last year’s top box office grosser ($1.6 billion worldwide, a first for animation), put Pixar back on top theatrically after its recent drought. First-time director Kelsey Mann tapped into anxiety as the newest and most resonant emotion for 13-year-old Riley (Kensington Tallman). Voiced brilliantly by Maya Hawke, the hyper-active, orange, and stringy Anxiety mounts a hostile takeover of Riley’s emotions with cohorts Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser). While Riley goes into overdrive to impress at summer hockey camp, Joy (Amy Poehler) and the regulars attempt to restore her Belief System and Sense of Self, which represent the latest world-building wonders from Pixar.
“Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” directed by franchise creator Nick Park and creative director Crossingham, marks the feature-length return of Aardman’s favorite stop-motion pals, who struggle with their first existential crisis because of Wallace’s obsession with invention. It’s about an out-of-control “smart gnome,” Norbot (Reece Shearsmith), with a mind of its own. The fiendish plot also involves fan-favorite Feathers McGraw, the villainous penguin from the Oscar-winning short “The Wrong Trousers.”
“Memoir of a Snail,” which took last year’s Annecy Cristal Award and also won the Animation Is Film Audience Award, is the second stop-motion feature from Adam Elliot (“Mary and Max”), the claymation master of monochromatic melancholy. The semi-autobiographical story concerns sad, lonely, and snail-hoarding Gracie (Sarah Snook), who narrates her life story in a letter to her favorite snail, Sylvia. She details her life of mistreatment and the trauma that led to her retreating from life. Gracie pines for her long-lost twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who’s had it rough as well on the other side of the country with an abusive religious cult.
Nominees are listed below in order of likelihood they will win.
Contenders
“The Wild Robot” (DreamWorks/Universal)
“Flow” (Sideshow and Janus Films)
“Inside Out 2” (Pixar/Disney)
“Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” (Aardman/Netflix)
“Memoir of a Snail” (IFC Films)
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