Here Are All the Oscar Winners for Best Animated Feature

Flow won the Oscar for best animated feature on Sunday (March 2), becoming the first indie film to win in this category. It beat The Wild Robot, Memoir of a Snail and sequels to two past winners in this category, Inside Out 2 (Inside Out won in 2016) and Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit won in 2006).

Animated films have a rich history at the Academy Awards. Walt Disney received a special award in 1938 for the previous year’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was “recognized as a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field for the motion picture cartoon.”

Fifty years later, Richard Williams received a special achievement award for the animation direction of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The film also won three competitive Oscars.

But it wasn’t until 1991’s Beauty and the Beast that an animated film was nominated for best picture. Throughout the ’90s, the Oscars resisted adding a category for animated features, though John Lasseter received a special achievement award in 1996 “for his inspired leadership of the Pixar Toy Story team, resulting in the first feature-length computer-animated film.”

In 2001, the Academy finally added a category for best animated feature, with Shrek becoming the first winner in 2002. While the first two Toy Story films were released before the introduction of the category, Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4 both won in this category. (Toy Story 5 is scheduled for release in June 2026.)

Here’s a year-by-year recap of all the Oscar winners for best animated feature film. The years shown are the years of the awards presentation.