BAFTA Nominations Announced

 

As the awards season keeps rolling on next up is the BAFTA Film Awards. After the Golden Globes and before the Oscars, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts celebrates the best in cinema over the past 12 months. Since 2007 this has included an award for Best Animated Film, alongside a long-established award for Best British Animated Short.

This year's feature award nominees are historic as they feature the first ever nomination for Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli- as well as the first ever Japanese animated film full-stop. There are four nominees this year, while in some previous years there have been only three.

Miyazaki's The Boy And The Heron is nominated alongside Sony's superhero sequel Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse. Pixar and Pete Sohn's Elemental is also nominated. The final spot goes to Aardman Animation's Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget. The latter has not been popping up in many other nominations but has a 'hometown advantage' as it's a British-made film. Surprisingly though, BAFTA has never yet given the award to an Aardman film. Will this be the year? The category is primarily seen as a two-horse race between Spider-Verse and The Boy And The Heron, so it would seem unlikely, but BAFTA has surprised before. The British Academy awarded Kubo And the Two Strings and Klaus while Oscar went for much after options,

The Best British Animated Short nominees are: Crab Day by Ross Stringer, Bartosz Stanislawek and Aleksandra Sykulak, Visible Mending by Samantha Moore and Tilley Bancroft and Wild Summon by Karni Arieli, Saul Freed, and Jay Woolley. Wild Summon is nominated off the back of being selected for Cannes and Annecy in 2023.  Crab Day is a 2D animation from the National Film and Television School, and Visible Mending is a stop-motion film.

The Special Visual Effects nominations went to, The Creator, Guardians Of The Galaxy Volume 3, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One, Napoleon and Poor Things.

Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse picked up an additional nomination for Best Original Score for Daniel Pemberton. This follows a similar nomination at the Golden Globes.

The BAFTA Film Awards will take place on Sunday, February 18.