Fujimoto's Look Back eligible for 2025 Oscars' Animated Feature Film category

Modified Nov 23, 2024 13:13 GMT

Thursday, November 21, 2024, saw The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announce Look Back and several other anime films as eligible for the 2025 Oscars. The films in question are eligible for the Animated Feature category, with the International Feature and Documentary Feature categories also being announced.

Look Back, Studio Durian’s anime film adapting Chainsaw Man mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto’s original one–shot manga of the same name, is one of the two most notable films listed. The other most notable film in the Animated Feature category eligible is Sola Entertainment’s The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim film.

Look Back, Lord of the Rings anime film, Science SARU’s The Colors Within, and more are 2025 Oscars eligible

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In total, 31 films including Durian and director Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s Look Back were announced as eligible for the Animated Feature category. Durian and Oshiyama’s film is likely the most well-known internationally of them all, thanks in part to its incredibly positive reception in the West and its recent streaming premiere. The film is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video as of this article’s writing in both the original Japanese language with subtitles and an English dub.

The other anime films and Japanese media-related films include Naoko Yamada and Science SARU’s The Colors Within, Yoku Kuno, Nobuhiro Yamashita, Shinei Animation, and France’s Myu Production’s Ghost Cat Anzu 2D film, Yoshioyuki Momose and Studio Ponoc’s anime film adaptation of A.F. Harrold and Emily Gravett’s original The Imaginary novel, and Kenji Kamiyama and Sola Entertainment’s aforementioned The Lord of the Rings anime film.

Josh Cooley’s Transformers One CG animated film and Shannon Tindle and Industrial Light and Magic’s Ultraman: Rising CG animated film are also nominated for the same category. The latter film premiered worldwide on Netflix on June 14, 2024, while the former was released in the United States on September 20, 2024, and is still screening. Transformers One is also available in several countries internationally.

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Some of the films mentioned above still need to fulfill an American screening requirement to fully qualify for consideration. They can do so by playing in at least one theater in one of six major American metropolitan areas for at least one week by December 31, 2024. The six areas are Los Angeles County, the City of New York (five boroughs), the Bay Area of California, Chicago, Miami, and Atlanta. The latter three cities consider county-wide screenings eligible.

October 7, 2024, the original last day of Look Back’s United States screening, saw the official GKIDS Films X account share that the film would screen past that date. With this in mind, it should fully qualify for eligibility even with the above caveat in consideration. Fans can expect to hear the official nominations sometime early in the 2025 calendar year.