For our fourth Rundown article, we look at the artificial environments and characters that entertained adults and children this year. After the jump, you’ll find our winner and runner-up predictions for Best Animated Feature as well as general commentary about the race. Tomorrow, we’ll cover one of the year’s supporting categories.

Best Animated Feature

Winner Predictions

• The Croods
• Despicable Me 2
• Ernest & Celestine
• Frozen (WL O) (PP O) (TB O)
• The Wind Rises

Runner-Up Predictions

• The Wind Rises (WL O) (PP O) (TB O)

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Wesley Lovell: There are only a couple of categories this year that you could say are foregone conclusions. Best Animated Feature is easily one of them. Early in the precursor season, The Wind Rises carried a number of the early prizes, which threatened Disney’s first-ever win in this category. Yet, as the film became a box office behemoth and critics became more generally favorable to the film (the Hayao Miyazaki film has not opened outside of its qualifying run yet), a victor other than Frozen seems highly unlikely at this juncture, especially with the entire membership voting.
Peter J. Patrick: Barring a surge for Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki’s purported laat film, The Wind Rises, this one is Disney’s Frozen‘s to lose.
Tripp Burton: Frozen has been a gigantic success critically and commercially, and should win this award pretty handily. That is, unless the Academy decides that it wants to award the legendary Hayao Miyazaki one last time for his final film. But I doubt that will happen.

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