Instead of boring headshots, THR asked the panelists on the 2025 Animation Roundtable to provide sketches of themselves. (Zootopia 2 co-director Jared Bush is the exception. "I do stick figures," he told THR, so Ryan Green drew his caricature.) Clockwise from top left: Bush, In Your Dreams co-director Alex Woo, Little Amélie co-director Liane-Cho Han, KPop Demon Hunters co-director Maggie Kang, Arco director Ugo Bienvenu and Elio co-director Domee Shi. Courtesy of Ryan Green, Alex Woo, Liane-Cho Han, Ugo Bienvenu, Domee Shi, Maggie Kang. No Oscar category showcases a broader creative spectrum than animation. Where else could a $10 million 2D philosophical French drama about death compete on equal footing with the sequel to a $1 billion blockbuster? This year's contenders for Best Animated Feature reach across genres, cultures and styles. Neon's hand-crafted Arco is a Hayao Miyazaki-style time-traveling fantasy about a boy from the future who travels on rainbows and offers humanity an alternative to climate change disaster. GKids' intimate cross-cultural childhood drama Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, another 2D film, follows the internal life of a young Belgian girl growing up in post-war Japan. Among the studio titles, we have the noir-tinged crime tale of Disney's marquee franchise sequel Zootopia 2 which returning us to the all-creature metropolis of the 2016 original, and the horror/sci-fi mash up of Pixar's Elio, about a boy desperate to be abducted by aliens. Netflix this year delivered both the girl-power musical/action combo of global phenomenon K-Pop Demon Hunters, and the family fantasy of In Your Dreams about two kids who travel to dreamland in search for real-life solutions. Related Stories Movies Oscar-Contending Docs on the Front Lines in the Middle East TV Ego Nwodim to Host 2026 Film Independent Spirit Awards For THR's Animation Roundtable, the helmers of this awards season's frontrunners - Arco director Ugo Bienvenu, Zootopia 2 co-director Jared Bush, Little Amélie co-director Liane-Cho Han, KPop Demon Hunters co-director Maggie Kang, Elio co-director Domee Shi, and In Your Dreams co-director Alex Woo - talk originality, shifting audience expectation and why, for animation, "nerd love" is not only tolerated but required. What makes a great animated filmmaker? LIANE-CHO HAN Patience. MAGGIE KANG You have to be a super collaborator. You have to have a lot of stamina because it takes a while to make these. DOMEE SHI You have to be slightly masochistic. It's a painful and long process and you have to love it. You have to love the pain and the payoff of watching one beautiful second of animation that you've toiled for months over. KANG Or years. JARED BUSH I think you have to also love evolving a story. At least for me, you're not coming in with a story that stays in the same place, but it's this constant evolution that's aided by all that collaborative help that you're getting. UGO BIENVENU Also, for me, it's about knowing every field of the work. It's good to know every part of the job so you can explain and help people work on it and find solutions. KANG You also have to spin a lot of plates at the same time. Sometimes it's, like, hundreds. BUSH I think you also have to love animation. I mean, it seems like that's an obvious thing, but I don't know if that's the case for everybody. I think you actually have to love the medium in order to be a successful filmmaker. ALEX WOO Yeah, I totally agree. I was going to say that I think you have to be a real nerd about animation. You have to know the history of it. You have to know the technique of it, the craft of it, to really take advantage of everything the medium has to offer because it's such an incredible medium. Having really deep nerd love for animation really helps when you're directing. Maggie, KPop Demon Hunters has become a cultural phenomenon across music, film and animation. But you spent a long time developing the project before Netflix came on board. What kept you going all those years developing this original, untested idea? KANG Passion. I knew I wanted to see this movie, and that's the thing that really drove me the entire time. You're creating something out of nothing, which is, I think, the hardest thing to do as a human being. When you see it slowly come together and then you start to build a team that is helping you see this vision through, it just keeps fueling you no matter how hard it gets. You also don't want to let your team down that's putting all this love into something that you came up with. Ugo, Arco is your first feature animation film. What was your personal connection to the story that made you want to take the leap? BIENVENU I've been doing science fiction since 10 years, almost. And one day it appeared to me super clearly, "OK, we're living in a bad science fiction movie." And I thought, "It's because mainly, we're always telling a bad future story," you know? And if we just imagine the worst, it's just go