BAFTA (The British Academy of Film and Television Arts) has announced its nominees in this year’s Best Animated Film category. They are “Elio”, “Little Amelie or The Character of Rain” and “Zootopia 2”. One animated feature you might be surprised isn’t on the list is “KPop Demon Hunters”. Due to U.K. theatrical release guidelines in its rules, the BAFTAs determined “KPop” was ineligible. So the Animated Film BAFTA winner, which will be announced on Feb. 22, will make things a little more interesting heading into the Oscars on Mar. 15.

2026 marks 20 years of the contemporary Best Animated Film BAFTA category. (Feature and short animation were combined into one group from the mid-50s to the early ’80s.) “Happy Feet” was the inaugural recipient in February 2007. The other nominees were Pixar’s “Cars” and DreamWorks and Aardman collab “Flushed Away”. BAFTA has often recognized the U.K.’s beloved Aardman with nominations in this category, including “Arthur Christmas” (CG collab with Sony) in 2012, “Shaun the Sheep Movie” in 2016, “Farmageddon: A Shaun the Sheep Movie” in 2020 and “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” in 2024. But it wasn’t until last year when Aardman finally won in the Best Animated Film category, with “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl”.

The BAFTA and Oscar winners matched for the first eight years, with “Happy Feet”, “Ratatouille”, “WALL-E”, “Up”, “Toy Story 3”, “Rango”, “Brave” and “Frozen”. In 2015, “The LEGO Movie”, which was snubbed by the Oscars, beat “Big Hero 6” and “The Boxtrolls” for the BAFTA win. Other BAFTA nominees over the years that were not on the Best Animated Feature Oscar ballot include “Shrek the Third”, “The Simpsons Movie”, “Waltz with Bashir”, “Despicable Me”, “The Adventures of Tintin”, “Monsters University” and “Minions”.

2016 was a victory for “Inside Out”, followed by a surprise win in 2017 for Laika’s stop-motion “Kubo and the Two Strings”, over a trio of Disney representatives, “Zootopia”, “Moana” and Pixar’s “Finding Dory”. The next winners were “Coco” and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”. Then in 2020, Spain’s “Klaus”, from Netflix and director Sergio Pablos, earned the BAFTA. This was followed by category wins for “Soul”, “Encanto”, “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”, “The Boy and the Heron”, and most recently “W&G”.

We’ll see which animated film earns the distinguished BAFTA honor in less than a month!