BAFTA Nominees 2025: The Dismissal of Animated Films Continues
“Animation is not a genre for kids. It’s a medium for art, it’s a medium for film, and I think animation should stay in the conversation” veteran director Guillermo del Toro said in his acceptance speech back at the 2023 BAFTA awards ceremony. Following the announcement of the 2025 EE BAFTA shortlisted nominees last week, it’s unfortunately clear to see that BAFTA continues to dismiss this sentiment.
While issues around certain biases, pigeonholing the medium and dismissing foreign entries are nothing new (and continue to reverberate throughout the industry), changes to awards are clearly pushing children’s films into the main animation categories – much to the detriment of the medium. It certainly didn’t help that nominees in the Animated Film category weren’t even announced on the official BAFTA live stream.
Back in 2023, BAFTA unfortunately scrapped the BAFTA Children and Young People Awards due to a “consistent drop in entries and engagement” according to Variety. The loss of these awards led to new categories for the children’s media sector being introduced to BAFTA’s film, games and television awards in 2025.
Enter the new Children’s and Family Film award, the first new category to be introduced to the EE BAFTA Film Awards in five years – following the Casting award in 2020. Introduced with the angle to “celebrate the very best films appealing to inter-generational audiences”, the longlist further perpetuates the pigeonholing of a majority of animated films in this category, with the biopic Young Woman and the Sea the only outlier.
While the animation industry is still reeling with the loss of the BAFTA Children and Young People Awards, the subsequent incorporation into the annual film ceremony has meant that the animated categories (along with the new Children’s and Family Film category) have clearly become the workhorse to make up for their scrapping.
Moreover, the shortlisted nominees in the Animated Film and the Children’s and Family Film award proved the exact same line-up bar Kensuke’s Kingdom for Inside Out 2 – further reinforcing the bias towards animation being purely for children.
While historically only three animated films have made the Best Picture lineup at the Oscars (Beauty and the Beast, Up and Toy Story 3), only Shrek has cracked the Best Film category at the BAFTAs so far. It could be argued that DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot (based on Peter Brown’s series of books) could have made the Best Film category this year following serious critical and audience acclaim, an impressive box office and a significant awards campaign. That didn’t pan out though, with a grand total of 0 animated films nominated in the category.
There were also a number of shock omissions this year. While the longlist for Animated Film included the much loved Australian stop-motion film-maker Adam Elliot’s latest instalment Memoir of a Snail, the charming and poignant film was shockingly absent from the shortlist in favour of more mainstream films from the usual suspects (excluding the wonderful Latvian entry, Flow).
Critically acclaimed anime features Look Back (Kiyotaka Oshiyama) and The Colours Within (Naoko Yamada) unfortunately didn’t even make the longlist. (Funnily enough, eight of the animated features that did make it were all in the English language features – while one didn’t feature dialogue at all).
However, The Colours Within would have unfortunately struggled with meeting eligibility to qualify (at least ten commercial screenings in the UK for at least seven days in aggregate (or the equivalent of a minimum of 70 screenings in the Animated Film category) raising questions over BAFTA’s eligibility criteria perhaps shutting out certain features.
Furthermore, popular films such as Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Transformers One, Ultraman: Rising and Paddington in Peru were also surprisingly omitted from the Children and Young People Awards longlist.
One key issue that stands out – and has proved a continued bone of contention – is the number of shortlisted nominees per category. Animated Film & Children’s and Family Film only consists of four nominees, while British Short Animation clocks in at a mere three, proving significantly less than five for the majority of categories – including British Short Film. This cap means that worthy films have unfortunately been shut out of contention due to simply having no room for them in the capped shortlisting (aka Memoir of a Snail).
This is down to BAFTAs’ rules around how many films can advance from the longlist to the shortlist, following the total number of eligible films submitted for consideration. For example, in the Animated Film category, a total of 16 eligible films were submitted, but only eight films advanced to the longlist in that category. Meanwhile, only six films advanced in the longlist for British Short Animation, while the total number of eligible films submitted was not disclosed.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom on the animated short film front, as ongoing industry campaigning has led to a positive eligibility update. Films screened at UK film festivals such as Manchester Animation Festival (MAF) – coined BAFTA’s new British Short Animation Qualifying Festivals – can now automatically be longlisted for BAFTA’s British Short Animation award. This has significantly helped support emerging new talent in regards to inclusivity and streamlining the awarding process.
(In contrast, BAFTA Scotland recently combined their Animated Short category into their Animated Film category – titled ‘The Short Film & Animation category’ – and charged for entries, proving another nail in the coffin for shorts in spite of a thriving industry.)
Still, it’s fantastic to see Aardman’s latest instalment Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl make the shortlist for Outstanding British Film alongside nine live-action films, including the critically acclaimed award darling Conclave, Ridley Scott’s blockbuster sequel Gladiator II and Irish-language film Kneecap, which recently scooped the top prize at the British Independent Film Awards. Cracking!
Despite the positive steps to improve the eligibility process in the animated short category, BAFTA certainly has a lot of room for improvement when it comes to perceptions of bias in certain categories. Why aren’t directors, editors, composers and production designers etc of animated features being considered for these categories too? In the recent Oscars nomination announcement, Flow was revealed to be nominated in the International Film category, while Wild Robot was also nominated in the Score category – so there’s no excuse.
There’s no doubt that BAFTA should be more inclusive towards animated features and creative teams, but should the animation community be challenging the awarding body to be better too? Should the animated industry be submitting and campaigning their amazing films for these wider categories as well, giving BAFTA a chance to prove they are an organisation willing to view film as a mechanic for art and not as a strict live action/animation division? What do you think?