THE animation category at this year's Oscars ceremony presents a crowded field of singing frogs, sly foxes and spunky kids, but despite some tough competition, the high-flying adventure movie Up is expected to float away with the Oscar, writes Alex Dobuzinskis.
Disney/Pixar's Up became the only animated film apart from 1991's Beauty and the Beast to land a best picture nod, and the movie about a boy and an old man who fly off in a house tied to balloons is also nominated in the animated category.
There, it's up against Twentieth Century Fox's Fantastic Mr Fox, the Walt Disney's The Princess and the Frog, Focus Features' Coraline and European production The Secret of Kells, which critics say was a surprise choice, because it played in only a handful of US theatres.
Filmmakers and critics say the nominated movies are all very different, all very good and rival the dramas in the coveted best picture category.
"Animation actually outdid the live-action movies this year, it's an extraordinarily competitive field in terms of quality," said Peter Hammond, a critic with Los Angeles Times awards tracker TheEnvelope.com.
But Hammond said Up is the 'overwhelming favourite' in the animated category.
The five animated movies include two that came out in 3-D (Up and Coraline), two made with tiny figurines manipulated through a painstaking process called stop-motion (Fantastic Mr Fox and Coraline) and two hand-drawn films (The Princess and the Frog and The Secret of Kells).
"It's really cool, because I feel like a number of years ago all the films were in the same zone, all trying to do the same type of thing," said Pete Docter, co-director of Up. "And now it's so many different approaches to it, that it shows that animation is in a healthy place."
The Oscar field for animation was widened to five films this year, from its usual three, because of the amount of eligible films.
