Regardless of record-breaking field workplace success and robust awards-season visibility, Demon Slayer: Infinity Fortress Half 1 didn’t safe a nomination on the 98th Academy Awards.
The Academy of Movement Image Arts and Sciences introduced the nominees throughout a livestream on Jan 22, 2026, naming Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans’ KPop Demon Hunters among the many 5 contenders for Finest Animated Function Movie. The movie additionally acquired a nomination within the Unique Music class for “Golden.”
The remaining nominees within the animated function class are Zootopia 2, Elio, Arco, and Little Amélie or the Character of Rain.
The Oscars ceremony is scheduled to happen on March 15 on the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.
Notably absent from the listing had been Demon Slayer: Infinity Fortress and Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc, the one two Japanese anime movies broadly thought-about eligible for nominations this 12 months, marking a serious setback for anime within the Finest Animated Function Movie race.
Demon Slayer: Infinity Fortress was one of the vital commercially profitable movies of 2025, grossing greater than $779.5 million worldwide. It ranked because the seventh-highest-grossing movie of the 12 months and have become the highest-grossing worldwide movie ever launched in america, surpassing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).
The movie additionally set a number of business data, together with changing into the highest-grossing Japanese movie of all time worldwide, the highest-grossing R-rated animated movie, and the primary R-rated non-American animated movie to cross the $700 million mark globally.
The movie’s Oscars shutout follows an identical consequence earlier within the awards season. On the Golden Globe Awards, Demon Slayer: Infinity Fortress misplaced the Finest Movement Image – Animated award to KPop Demon Hunters.
Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc additionally posted robust field workplace numbers, incomes greater than $174.7 million worldwide and rating because the thirteenth highest-grossing Japanese movie of all time.
The absence of anime titles on this 12 months’s lineup continues a broader development on the Oscars.
In 2025, no anime movies had been nominated for Finest Animated Function Movie, regardless of 5 anime motion pictures being eligible, together with Look Again, The Colours Inside, Ghost Cat Anzu, The Imaginary and The Lord of the Rings: The Conflict of the Rohirrim.
Lately, anime illustration within the class has been restricted. Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron gained the Finest Animated Function Movie award on the 96th Academy Awards on March 10, 2024, marking the director’s second Oscar win following Spirited Away in 2003. It was additionally the one anime movie nominated that 12 months.
From 2020 by way of 2023, no anime movies acquired nominations within the class.
Earlier than The Boy and the Heron, Mamoru Hosoda’s Mirai was the final anime movie to earn an Academy Award nomination for Finest Animated Function Movie, in 2019.
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