The European Film Academy on Wednesday unveiled the 5 nominees for best animated feature for this year’s European Film Awards.
The 2024 animated nominees include Gints Zilbalodis Flow, a dialog-free eco-fable about a cat that bands together with other animals to try and survive a cataclysmic flood; Living Large, a coming-of-age tale from Kristina Dufková about a heavy-set 12-year-boy with a talent in the kitchen; Savages, Claude Barras’ Boreno-set drama about deforestation and a lost baby orangutan; Isabel Herguera’s Sultana’s Dream, about a Spanish artist who becomes obsessed with finding a female utopia where women can live in peace; and They Shot the Piano Player from directors Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal, a portrait of Francisco Tenório Júnior, a leading light of the thriving Brazilian music scene of the 1960s and ’70s who went missing in 1976.
All 5 nominees will also be eligible for the top prize of best European film after the academy announced earlier this month that they were opening up the best film category to animation and documentary movies for the first time.
The nominees are a cross-section of animated styles — Flow is in computer-designed 3D, Savages and Living Large are claymations, Sultana’s Dream and They Shot the Piano Player are hand drawn — and nationalities. Zilbalodis is Latvian, Dufková Czech, and Barras Swiss. Herguera, Trueba and Mariscal are all Spanish.
It’s a pretty acclaimed bunch. Flow and Sultana’s Dream were big winners at the Annecy animation festival earlier this year. Savages premiered in Cannes this year and They Shot the Piano Player — which features the voice talents of Jeff Goldblum — bowed in Toronto last year.
The European Film Awards have in the past been a harbinger of future honors. Last year’s animated feature winner, Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams, scored a surprise Oscar nomination.
The full European Film Awards nominations will be announced on November 5. The 2024 European Film Awards will be held on December 7 in Lucerne, Switzerland.
