Toy Story 3
Nominees:
How to Train Your Dragon
The Illusionist
Toy Story 3
Animated features ruled at the 2010 box office. For the first time ever, five of the year's 10 top-grossing films — Toy Story 3, How to Train Your Dragon, Despicable Me, Shrek Forever After and Tangled — were cartoons. And they routinely earned a higher level of critical rapture than their live-action brethren; Toy Story 3 was the year's most enthusiastically reviewed movie. But because fewer than 16 animated features were declared eligible by the Academy, this year's list was reduced to three entries. Following its foreign-friendly path, the animation branch ignored the Sony hit Despicable Me for The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet's dry, artsy tribute to the late French actor-director Jacques Tati. It took the slot that Chomet earned seven years ago with The Triplets of Belleville and which is often reserved for Hayao Miyazaki's hand-drawn fables. But The Illusionist and Dragon will stand aside when Pixar wins its fourth-consecutive Oscar, after Ratatouille, WALL•E and Up.