Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, the leading moneymaker in the history of Japanese cinema, has been included in a list for possible nominees for the Academy Award for animated feature film along with sixteen other films.  This is only the second year for the animated feature Oscar, which Shrek won last year.  The other films considered for nomination this year include: Ice Age, Lilo & Stitch, The Powerpuff Girls Movie, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, Treasure Planet, Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights, Alibaba & the Forty Thieves, Eden, El Bosque animado, Hey Arnold! The Movie, Jonah -- A Veggie Tales Movie, Mutant Aliens, The Princess and the Pea, Return to Neverland, Stuart Little 2, and the Wild Thornberrys Movie.  The Academy's feature film award screening committee will decide which of the 17 films will actually receive a nomination.  Typically up to five films make to the final nomination phase -- it is indeed an honor to be nominated.

Miyazaki's Spirited Away is the only anime feature to be considered for the nomination this year and is also clearly the most complex, poetic, and stimulating film among those being considered.  It may be hampered, however, by its very Japanese storyline, which includes numerous references to Japanese mythology, which is not well known here in the West, and by Disney's timid, limited release of the film, which rolled it out slowly to a limited number of primarily art house theatres in the U.S. 

Disney, which lost the inaugural feature-length animation Oscar to Dreamworks last year, would certainly like to win the category, since it invented the animated feature in the 1930s with the release of Snow White.  However Disney's best homegrown hope, Lilo & Stitch, is a cute, modestly budgeted project from Disney's Florida production facility that lacks the scope and importance of an Oscar winner, while the more expensively animated Treasure Planet is a major box office disappointment (see 'The End of an Era at Disney?'. Although it was made independently in Japan, Spirited Away is Disney's best hope of winning its first Oscar in this category. Other top American contenders include the computer animated Ice Age and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, both of which did well at the box office and should have enough juice to get nominations.