2025 Oscar Animated Feature Nominees: 5 Directors Pick Pivotal Scenes from Their Films

IndieWire invited the directors of the five Oscar-nominated Best Animated Features to pick and analyze a pivotal scene that best represents their films: Chris Sanders (“The Wild Robot“), Gints Zilbalodis (“Flow”), Kelsey Mann (“Inside Out 2“), Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham (“Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl”), and Adam Elliot (“Memoir of a Snail”).

“The Wild Robot,” the Best Feature Annie winner, is the crowning achievement for writer-director Sanders (“How to Train Your Dragon,” “Lilo & Stitch”). The dramatically compelling and visually arresting sci-fi adventure (adapted from Peter Brown’s illustrated book) finds robot Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) washed ashore on an uninhabited island, where she must adapt and survive among the animals. DreamWorks’ innovative handmade stylization takes Sanders back to his 2D roots with its tactile nature and watercolor backgrounds. The more time Roz spends in the wild, the more her surface changes with dents, scratches, mildew, and mold. She quickly becomes a hand-painted surface, blending in with the animals and the wilderness.

With “Flow” (the Best Independent Feature Annie winner and Latvian nominee for Best International Feature), Zilbalodis delivered the animation surprise of the year, dazzling critics and audiences alike with his engrossing and non-talking animal survival adventure. It’s about a lone black cat fleeing an island during a massive flood and learning to live with other animals on a boat that drifts toward a post-apocalyptic world. It’s totally cinematic and suspenseful, like Hayao Miyazaki meets Alfonso Cuarón. The film immerses us in the action from the cat’s POV with a roving, 360-degree camera. The use of the open-source Blender software enabled the animation team to economically render the animals with less detail than the background environments (including the sunken cities and mountains) and still have it look striking.

Newbie Pixar director Kelsey Mann had a brilliant idea for “Inside Out 2”: tapping into anxiety for 13-year-old Riley (Kensington Tallman), which resonated with audiences and became last year’s top box office grosser ($1.6 billion worldwide, a first for animation). Voiced brilliantly by Maya Hawke, the hyper-active, orange, and stringy Anxiety mounts a hostile takeover of Riley’s emotions and forces a reckoning about her Belief System and Sense of Self. Pixar introduced new articulation tools for more expressive characters and more colorful and intricate environments inside Riley’s mind.

Aardman’s legendary director Nick Park reached a culmination of sorts with “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” (in collaboration with director Merlin Crossingham). Park created a first-time existential crisis for obsessive inventor Wallace and his canine pal Gromit when Wallace goes too far with an out-of-control “smart gnome” called Norbot (Reece Shearsmith). Not only does Wallace lose sight of the human touch with his AI experiment, but he inadvertently entices the penguin arch-villain, Feathers McGraw, into manipulating Norbot for his fiendish heist. Leave it to Park and Crossingham to come up with the ultimate tech gone wrong scenario to show off their stop-motion brilliance.

Adam Elliot’s semi-autobiographical “Memoir of a Snail” also utilizes stop-motion brilliantly but on a much more modest scale. It’s about the snail-hoarding Grace (Sarah Snook), who narrates her tragic memoir while writing a letter to her favorite snail, Sylvia. She details her mistreatment and the traumas that led to her retreating from life in Australia. Grace pines for her long-lost twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and dreams of becoming a filmmaker. It’s a dark but uplifting film about loneliness, toxic relationships, and the importance of cinema.

‘The Wild Robot’: The Migration

‘The Wild Robot’Universal Pictures

When Roz adopts the orphaned gosling bird Brightbill (Kit Connor), she discovers how hard it is to be a mother. However, it’s one thing to figure out how to teach the barnacle goose to fly but quite another to say goodbye during the “Migration.”

“The ‘Migration’ was a physical embodiment of the emotional complexities that were at a turning point in the story of ‘The Wild Robot.’ Roz has been focused on the goal of getting Brightbill into the air without awareness of the emotional cliff she’s been hurtling toward, so we have a visual, emotional, and sonic turning point the likes of which I’ve never encountered at the midpoint of a film,” Sanders said.

“Kris Bowers, our composer, had started sketching melodies and crafting themes fairly early, and we’d discussed the bittersweet moment between Roz, Brightbill, and Longneck [the elderly barnacle goose voiced by Bill Nighy], likening it to a parent dropping their child off at college. Everything was about timing. I wanted that last, critical bit of information from Longneck to come at just the moment, and Bill Nighy’s delivery was perfect: ‘Do you see any other geese here your size? The accident that killed your family, saved you. Funny, how life works.’

“Suddenly, Brightbill’s perspective is changed. He needs to repair things, but it’s too late… the migration has begun. Kris Bowers’ score kicks in, slow but steady. Brightbill wants, no, needs to set things right: ‘I could use a boost.’ Roz knows he does not. Filled with sudden joy, she lifts Brightbill onto her shoulder.

“Our light was designed to accentuate the separation of mother and child. The ground plane is cool shadows and mist; the morning light creates a layer that the geese rise into. Brightbill lets go and rises into the luminous layer to join the geese while Roz is left behind in the cool blues and greens.

“Once Brightbill is out of sight, Roz does a very un-programmed thing: she suddenly dashes forward. The architecture of the island was designed to perfectly match the emotional cliff Roz has been hurtling towards from the start of the story. Roz dashes to the lip of a high precipice, leaning from a tree limb, straining to find Brightbill amongst thousands of near-identical geese.

“I decided we needed one last tug at the audience’s hearts. Longneck glances back to see a heartbroken robot. He peels his formation away from the migration to give Roz a fly-by: a final gift to a pining mother. The pass is designed to memorialize the unfinished business between Roz and Brightbill. It’s that unhealed wound that powers the movie through its second half.”

‘Flow’: Ascending

‘Flow’Sideshow

Starting “Flow” off with the massive flood for was quite daunting for director Zilbalodis. He wanted the water to look authentic and the camera work to be inventive (almost expressionistic), in following the cat’s POV. The cat flees to higher ground with a stampede of deer and other animals. Then, caught in a flood that submerges everything, the cat ascends and eventually wanders toward a boat with a capybara, lemur, stork, and golden retriever.

“I start writing the music while I’m still writing the screenplay. This is crucial for me because I need the music to guide me. Not only does this help us to avoid using temp music from other films, but also it helps me understand the story and gives me ideas for how it develops. I knew that on this journey the cat’s goal [during the ‘Ascending’ scene] is to reach the giant cliff towers where it thinks it’ll be able to escape from the flood. But for a long time, I couldn’t figure out what would actually happen when it got there. Only when I had this piece of music, I realized what this scene should be about. Or at least, how it should feel,” Zilbalodis said.

“I’d used mostly electronic instruments, which evoked some kind of cosmic imagery in my mind. This inspired colorful lights that appear. I thought that if I went into a more abstract, magical realism direction, I’d be able to express these things that I couldn’t with words. Had the music been made later, the scene would’ve been completely different. I also wanted to allow enough time for the music to develop, build up and draw you in. Without the music this scene just wouldn’t work. 

“The music also influenced the movement of the camera, which moves in a slow and deliberate way. It’s mostly expressing the cat’s POV but sometimes acting almost like another character. Getting distracted by something and looking around curiously.”

‘Inside Out 2’: The Projections

‘Inside Out 2’Pixar

Puberty brings a wrecking ball to the HQ of Riley’s emotions and Anxiety comes along with a new team to be an agent of change. This forces Joy (Amy Poehler) and company to mount a rescue mission, taking them farther inside Riley’s mind, where they encounter new adventures.

“We’ve all had this moment, when you lay down at night to go to sleep and your head hits the pillow. Rather than your mind slowing down, it begins to start working. On overdrive. This is the case for Riley in this ‘Projections’ scene. Her Anxiety is about to put in some overtime getting her ready for a big hockey scrimmage the next day. She’s overtaken Riley’s power of Imagination Land and is using it against her, having little mind workers come up with all the worst-case scenarios that could occur. She’s not deliberately trying to hurt her, but that’s the effect her cautious over planning is doing,” Mann said.

“This, of course, is making Riley toss and turn all night. This scene is influenced by so many movies for me. The space is like the cubicle-filled insurance company in ‘The Apartment,’ Joy pleads to the workers to stand with her like Sally Field in ‘Norma Rae,’ and Anger’s speech is reminiscent of Peter Finch’s in ‘Network.’ If I could have figured out a way to get him in a rain-soaked overcoat in the scene, I would’ve. This scene also is home to my personal favorite Easter Egg in the film. The mind worker that first comes to Joy’s aid in coming up with a positive projection is a nod to our late dear friend Ralph Eggleston, a Pixar legend and the production designer on the first ‘Inside Out.'”

‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’: Gardening

‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’Netflix

The introduction of Norbot upends the quiet domestic life between Wallace and Gromit. Although the latest gadgets have become a nuisance to Gromit, who misses personal contact with his pal, at least he has his gardening. But this pleasant hobby is taken away by the frantic, fast-talking Norbot, who creates a wall between them when he becomes the new favorite.

“We have chosen the gardening scene in Act 1 where Gromit is introduced to Wallace’s latest invention, a ‘nifty odd-jobbing robot’ called Norbot. Central to this scene is Wallace’s belief that gadgets and technology are the answer to everything. Utterly missing the fact that Gromit loves the process of gardening, like a painter likes to paint, it is the doing as much as the end result that is cherished. Norbot being the latest in ‘cutting hedge technology’ scalps Gromit’s garden, which helped set up the overarching theme of cold efficiency versus the human touch,” Park and Crossingham said.

“As this is the first time we meet Norbot, it is where we lay down the ground rules for him as a character. As the scene opens, we establish a contrast between Gromit alone enjoying the peace and tranquility of his beautiful garden; his only escape from Wallace’s household gadgets — versus the clinical functionality of Norbot. 

“At the start of the scene, the pace was deliberately slow and allowed to breathe with Gromit cherishing his beloved garden. But, as Norbot imposes himself on Gromit, the edit becomes more and more frenetic and the shot design more extreme in composition as the action escalates.

“This was also reflected in the performance of the animation. As a silent character, Gromit needs space in the edit to allow the audience into his head and to express his feelings. Our animators are our performers and, as directors, we talk to them about the scene, the timing, motivations, the character, yet we hardly ever mention animation at all.

“Amongst the mayhem that ensues around the garden, an underlying and tricky concern was to avoid portraying Norbot as nasty or vindictive towards Gromit. An all too easy thing to do. That was for later. For now, Norbot must stay essentially innocent and so must always be seen as helpful and happy. But of course, to Gromit, Norbot is annoyingly helpful. This was key in making the issue Gromit’s problem, exacerbating his sense of isolation and guilt in not being able to express his dismay at Wallace’s amazing new gift. As well as helping the tension and comedy, it has the effect of making Gromit flawed and therefore more relatable.”

‘Memoir of a Snail’: Pinky’s Monologue

‘Memoir of a Snail’IFC Films

Grace is forced to confront her self-imposed isolation when she discovers a letter from Pinky (Jacki Weaver), her late friend, who confides how she overcame her own sense of entrapment. She encourages Grace to move beyond her past traumas and embrace life to the fullest.

“In ‘Memoir of a Snail,’ the scene that exemplifies what I have been trying to achieve for the last 28 years as a film auteur is the Pinky monologue sequence towards the film’s climax. Grace has just discovered Pinky’s biscuit tin full of cash and a letter that reveals her secrets, life lessons, and wisdom. It’s a complex and dense scene where I wanted the poetry and beauty of the moment to shine through. Jacki Weaver gave the performance of a lifetime and nailed it first take,” Elliot said.

“With every film, I aim for at least one moment that is truly visceral, palpable; a moment of verisimilitude that makes the viewer tingle. The letter took me forever to write, with many iterations and rewrites. It was a process of distillation to ensure the letter was real, authentic, and believable (hard to do in an animated film).

“The visuals had to be just as potent; Grace stares directly at the audience while the background constantly morphs; from a vegetable garden to a Romanian orphanage, from a giant wall of shells, to a spinning room full of snail paraphernalia that slowly disappear into a wall of flames, culminating with Grace staring out her bedroom window looking content, her catharsis complete. It was a sequence that kept me awake at night for many years; would it be a pretentious mess, or a moving and dramatic montage skillfully edited to ensure all the moving parts worked together to achieve something cinematic and powerful? Thank god, it was the latter!”