Variety Awards Circuit section is the home for all awards news and related content throughout the year, featuring the following: the official predictions for the upcoming Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and Tony Awards ceremonies, curated by Variety chief awards editor Clayton Davis. The prediction pages reflect the current standings in the race and do not reflect personal preferences for any individual contender. As other formal (and informal) polls suggest, competitions are fluid and subject to change in response to buzz and events.
Predictions are updated every Thursday. Best Animated Feature Predictions Commentary (Updated: Nov. 3, 2026): This year, animated features aren’t just for kids. Laika’s “Wildwood” is the company’s first PG-13 film in its 17 years as a feature studio.
At 130 minutes, it ties the record for the longest English-language animated film ever made. Director and producer Travis Knight is already an Oscar nominee for “Kubo and the Two Strings” and has earned considerable respect from his peers and audiences alike. Knight was among the filmmakers featured in this year’s Pixels and Pencils panel, Variety’s conversation with animation directors at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival.
He was joined by Brad Bird (“Ray Gunn”), Daniel Chong (“Hoppers”), Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado (“Forgotten Island”) and Leah Nelson (“Tangles”), all of whom are also in the animated feature race. And that’s just the group represented on the panel. Louis Clichy’s “Iron Boy” and Andrew Stanton’s “Toy Story 5” are among the other contenders helping make this one of the category’s most competitive lineups in recent years.
Since “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” won the animated feature Oscar at the 95th Academy Awards, neither Disney nor Pixar has won the trophy. Instead, “The Boy and the Heron,” “Flow” and “KPop Demon Hunters” have taken home the prize, marking a significant shift for a category largely dominated by those two studios since “Shrek” won the inaugural award in 2002. Then there’s “Tangles,” a film that makes no attempt to disguise its ambitions as an adult story.
First-time feature director Leah Nelson co-wrote the film with Sarah Leavitt, adapting Leavitt’s graphic memoir about her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease in the late 1990s. Abbi Jacobson voices Sarah, while Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays her mother. Louis-Dreyfus is also a producer, alongside Seth Rogen and Lauren Miller Rogen.
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