Kubo And The Two Strings, directed by Travis Knight. A boy with extraordinary powers goes on an epic quest to find his late father’s armor and vanquish an evil spirit. Heavily influenced by Japanese art and culture, this stop-motion feature is the brain child of Travis Knight, a veteran animator and founder of Portland’s independent animation studio Laika. The key challenge, Knight told us, was adapting the artisanal technique of stop motion animation to “this specific kind of fantasy, this big, sweeping epic. Stop motion films tend to look like they are filmed on a table top because they are.” Not this one, for sure.Moana, directed by Ron Clements, John Musker, Don Hall and Chris Williams. In Ancient Polynesia an adventurous girl, Moana, decides to resume her ancestors’ explorations and, with the help of demigod Maui, find out why the world is out of balance – and how it can be put back together again. With a remarkable upgrade of Disney’s digital animation capacities, Moana continues the studio’s ventures in world culture, this time with the help of composer Opetaia Foa’I from the band Te Vaka, “as pure to the Polynesian heritage as is”, in the words of animation head John Lasseter.My Life As A Zucchini, directed by Claude Barras. Based on a novel by Gilles Paris, this Swiss stop-motion feature follows a boy who calls himself “Zucchini” into his new life a foster group home. A Tim Burton fan, Barras also found inspiration in François Truffaut’s classic tale of childhood under pressure. The 400 Blows: “My wish was to make a family picture that would speak to both children and adults”, Barras told HFPA member Rocio Ayuso. “A picture that could tell the same story with different levels of understanding.”Sing, directed by Christophe Lourdelet and Garth Jennings A down-on-his luck theater owner, the koala Buster Moon, decides to produce a singing competition in order to revive his career. “The main thing was that those animals had to be human caricatures and it was more important to me that they were recognizable as caricatures of ourselves”, Garth Jennings told us at the Paris headquarters of the animation studio Illumination.  The inspiration, Jennings added, came from a love for music, shared with Illumination founder Chris Meledandri. “We both adore music. (…) So I was trying to make something that will be a vessel for that.”Zootopia, directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Jared Bush. A return to Disney’s classical animals-in-clothes subgenre, Zootopia creates a fully realized world of anthropomorphic carnivores and herbivores living side by side in sometimes difficult circumstances, as exemplified by the tense relationship between a rookie bunny cop and a sly con artist fox. “We did a lot of research”, director Byron Howard told us. “We knew we wanted to make a great animal movie and so we did almost a year of research. And we discovered this pretty incredible fact that in the mammal world it’s 90% prey animals and 10% predators. That’s a really interesting thing.”中文介绍请看这里