Feb 19, 2024

The Boy and the Hare" is the first non-U.S. film to win an animated feature-length BAFTA, setting up an Oscar showdown with "Spider-Man".

Over the weekend, Hayao Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Hare" won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for Best Animated Feature Film in the UK, becoming the first non-US film to achieve this historic feat. The award has been around since 2006.

Studio Ghibli's latest film faced stiff competition at this year's BAFTAs, including awards rivals "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" and local favorite "Chicken Run": Pixar's "Elemental."

In addition to the animated feature BAFTAs, "The Boy and the Hare" also took top honors at the Golden Globes, NY Film Critics Circle, and LA Film Critics Association. Across the Spider-Verse won the Critics' Choice Award for Best Animated Feature before winning the Annie Award for Best Feature.

If "The Boy and the Hare" wins this year's Oscar for Best Animated Feature, it will be the first non-American film to win since Aardman's "Wallace and Gromit": 2005's "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit". The only other non-American film to win the award was Miyazaki's Spirited Away in 2002, the year after the category was introduced.

This year's BAFTA British Short Animation Award went to Crab Day, directed by Ross Stringer and written by Alexandra Sikulak. The film previously screened in competition at Fantoche and won the Best British Film award at the London International Animation Festival. This hand-drawn 2D short is a surprisingly cute coming-of-age story in which a boy must kill a crab for the first time to prove he is a man and win his father's approval.

One of the big surprises of the awards ceremony was that the award for best special effects went to Simon Hughes for his indie feature "Poor Things," directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, with a total budget of $35 million. This film was the first to win the award, after the CG-heavy sci-fi film "The Creator" ($80 million budget), which more than doubled its production cost, and the three Hollywood giants "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" ($250 million), "Mission: Impossible: Ghosts of Death" ($291 million), and " Napoleon" ($200 million). Most of these films would have spent their entire "creator" budgets on special effects alone.

This year's BAFTA winners in animation and VFX were.