Oscar season officially begins, as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) has revealed all the nominations for the 92nd Academy Awards! Actor John Cho (Searching) and actress Issa Rae (Insecure) took to the camera to announce the 124 nominations via livestream on January 13.

These nominations were spread over 53 films, with DC’s Joker gaining the most amount with 11. With this article, however, we’ll be focusing exclusively on the animation and visual effects nominations.

For Best Animated Feature, it was Netflix that ended up as the category’s powerhouse with two nominations, consisting of their international hand-drawn movies I Lost My Body (France), and Klaus (Spain). The other three were local mainstream releases, with DreamWorks’ grand franchise finale How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Pixar’s critically adored sequel Toy Story 4, and Laika’s Golden Globe-winning stop-motion flick Missing Link.

Toy Story 4 also scored an additional nomination for Best Original Song, given to Randy Newman’s “I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away”. This is on top of Disney’s other hit animated sequel Frozen II gaining a spot in that same category for the song “Into the Unknown”. These two will be competing with the three other nominated songs, including “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” from Rocketman, “I’m Standing With You” from Breakthrough, and “Stand Up” from Harriet.

In the running for Best Animated Short Film, independent stop-motion took a big presence with Daria Kashcheeva’s Dcera (Daughter), Bruno Collet/Jean-François Le Corre’s Mémorable, and Siqi Song’s Sister (妹妹). Additionally, one of Pixar’s new SparkShorts was chosen as a nomination, which was Rosana Sullivan’s deeply-touching 2D-animated Kitbull. There was also Matthew A. Cherry’s crowd-funded passion project Hair Love, which gained beloved mainstream attention thanks to the involvement of Sony Pictures Animation.

The Best Visual Effects category was essentially a copy-paste job of the 73rd BAFTA’s Best Special Visual Effects nominees. Disney’s photorealistic animated Lion King remake is among the VFX nominations, and will once again go up against Avengers: Endgame, The Irishman, 1917, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Below lists the categories featuring at least one nomination of an animated project, along with their recipients:

Best Animated Feature

• How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (Dean DeBlois, Bradford Lewis and Bonnie Arnold)
• I Lost My Body (Jérémy Clapin and Marc du Pontavice)
• Klaus (Sergio Pablos, Jinko Gotoh and Marisa Román)
• Missing Link (Chris Butler, Arianne Sutner and Travis Knight)
• Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley, Mark Nielsen and Jonas Rivera)

Best Animated Short Film

• Dcera [Daughter] (Daria Kashcheeva)
• Hair Love (Matthew A. Cherry and Karen Rupert Toliver)
• Kitbull (Rosana Sullivan and Kathryn Hendrickson)
• Mémorable (Bruno Collet and Jean-François Le Corre)
• Sister [妹妹] (Siqi Song)

Best Original Song

• “I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away” (from Toy Story 4; Music and Lyric by Randy Newman)
• “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” (from Rocketman; Music by Elton John; Lyric by Bernie Taupin)
• “I’m Standing With You” (from Breakthrough; Music and Lyric by Diane Warren)
• “Into the Unknown” (from Frozen II; Music and Lyric by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez)
• “Stand Up” (from Harriet; Music and Lyric by Joshuah Brian Campbell and Cynthia Erivo)

Best Visual Effects

• Avengers: Endgame (Dan DeLeeuw, Russell Earl, Matt Aitken and Dan Sudick)
• The Irishman (Pablo Helman, Leandro Estebecorena, Nelson Sepulveda-Fauser and Stephane Grabli)
• The Lion King [2019] (Robert Legato, Adam Valdez, Andrew R. Jones and Elliot Newman)
• 1917 (Guillaume Rocheron, Greg Butler and Dominic Tuohy)
• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (Roger Guyett, Neal Scanlan, Patrick Tubach and Dominic Tuohy)

The 92nd Academy Awards will take place on Sunday, February 9, 2020, in the Dolby Theatre at the Hollywood & Highland Center, California. A full list of all the ceremony’s nominations can be viewed here.

Which of the animation nominations are you rooting for to win the Oscar? Give us your thoughts in the comments!

Edited by: Kelly Conley