Jan 17, 2024

Does an animated feature film need to win critical acclaim in order to be nominated for an Academy Award?

As we await the announcement of this year's Academy Award nominations, we wanted to examine the relationship between critics' reactions to animated feature films and indicators of whether a film would be nominated for an Academy Award.

To do this, we collected Rotten Tomatoes Meter scores for all films nominated for Best Animated Feature in the past 10 years.

Rotten Tomatoes, owned by NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery, defines this score as "the percentage of positive professional critical reviews for a given film or television show. To put it simply, let's say a film receives 100 reviews, 75 of which are positive. That film has a critical score of 75%.

Not everyone can submit a review. Each critic and/or publication must be pre-screened and go through an application process to become "Tomatometer Approved." In our study, we also include audience scores for each film, but this data is less reliable because sometimes the scores are verified (RT has evidence that the voter has seen the film) and sometimes they are not, and the scores can potentially be manipulated and should be viewed with more skepticism

The following is a list of the most common reasons why the scores are not reliable.

Below are the RT scores from both critics and audiences for some of this year's major contenders:

Some takeaways from the list:

Now, to give some context, here are the Academy Award nominations for animated feature films over the past decade and and how they were received by critics and audiences: