Best Motion Picture – Animated

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio directed by Guillermo del Toro

Inu-Oh directed by Masaaki Yuasa

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On directed by Dean Fleischer Camp

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish directed by Joel Crawford

Turning Red directed by Domee Shi

In addition to Best Motion Picture – Drama and Musical or Comedy, the Golden Globes Awards will honor one of five outstanding feature animated films of 2022.

Mexico born and internationally recognized Guillermo del Toro received the Golden Globe for Best Director in 2018 for The Shape of Water. The auteur’s most recent endeavor is turning the well-known Italian tale by Carlo Colloidi into a stop-motion animation film. “We tried to make animation in a way that says something different and beautiful. (Animation) is not a genre for kids. Animation is art. Animation is film,” the director insisted in a pre-talk at the film’s AFI Film Festival premiere.

Japanese writer director and animator Masaaki Yuasa’s work has been popular among anime fans globally. Inu-Oh was selected at the Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti in 2021. Yuasa and writer Hideo Furukawa reinvented the story of real-life Noh performer Inu-oh and his partner Tomona as a narrative of two young men who defy fate and construct their own future. According to the director’s statement at the festival, “it is also a story of life today, whether to align with fate and fashion to seize glory, or to forgo reward to live according to your beliefs”.

Marcel, an adorable shell with shoes, and his grandmother (Isabella Rossellini) go viral when a documentary filmmaker renting an Airbnb finds them and posts the video on YouTube. This funny and eccentric feature film is based on a short film Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate (Marcel’s voice) created in 2010. They stayed faithful to the initial idea by combining documentary and animation for the feature adaptation. “I wanted to make a movie that offered all the charms of a real documentary, that balanced comedy with gravitas, and never sold out the reality for a laugh,” Camp stated in the film’s press kit.

A sequel to Puss in Boots in 2011, this vibrant film confronts fearless cat Puss (Antonio Banderas) with only one life left out of nine. “Puss is a beloved character and really stole the show when he appeared in Shrek 2. His ‘last life’ is such a great nugget, and this is something resonated with me,” director Joel Crawford (The Croods: A New Age) said at the panel hosted by Gold Derby. “He has one life and we as human beings only have one life. There’s something deep and special about that opportunity to take the absurdity and put it with the reality.” This premise was successfully explored by Puss in his following adventure.

It was back in 2017 when Domee Shi was asked by Pixar to develop a feature film after she launched Bao, a short film about a woman whose dumpling comes to life and lives as a child. In Turning Red, Mei Lee, a Chinese Canadian tween girl, feels the conflict between being her mother’s perfect daughter and her desire to be independent. When she loses control of her temper, she transforms into a red panda. “I figured out my ideas are coming of age story of teen girls. A genre and a story I really wanted to tell 13-year-old me,” the first-time feature film director stated in the film’s Q&A.