Winning an Academy Award is the pinnacle of prestige in the film industry, but not every movie is remembered after the curtain closes. In the more than 20 years since the Best Animated Feature category was introduced at the Academy Awards, iconic films like Shrek, The Incredibles, Frozen, and most recently Flow have taken home Oscars, and they’ve been favorite rewatches ever since. Two other films that you forgot took home Oscars for Best Animated Feature just found new streaming homes, but you’ll need a few different subscriptions to watch them.
As streamers updated their content catalogs on November 1st, George Miller’s animated jukebox musical Happy Feet started streaming on HBO Max. The movie, which is “Certified Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes with a 76% critic score and took home an Oscar in 2006, stars Elijah Wood as Mumble, a young emperor penguin who can’t sing but has an unusual talent for tap dancing.
Animated film lovers can also now stream Rango after the Gore Verbinski-directed animated Western comedy joined Paramount+ and Tubi on November 1st. In the movie, Johnny Depp voices the titular pet chameleon, who accidentally winds up in Dirt, a frontier town in need of a sheriff. The film is “Certified Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes with an 88% critic score and pulled in a $246 million worldwide gross before going on to win Best Animated Feature at the 84th Academy Awards.
Happy Feet and Rango Deserve Their Oscar Wins
Both Happy Feet and Rango unfortunately fall into the category of films we forget have won Oscars. Both were produced by studios outside of the major animation houses like Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks, with Happy Feet coming from the Australian visual effects studio Animal Logic and distributed by Warner Brothers and Rango from Industrial Light & Magic and distributed by Paramount Pictures, making them surprise victors at their respective Academy Awards. But they both absolutely deserve their Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature.
More than just being a critical success, Rango proved to be a bizarre animated masterpiece that pushed the boundaries of what animation could achieve. The movie still stands out for its unique and creative visual style, with Verbinski perfectly employing lighting, camera work, and production design to give the film an almost live-action-like feel.
Happy Feet’s Oscar win was more controversial, as it faced some pretty stiff competition in the Best Animated Feature category with other films like Disney/Pixar’s Cars. The movie used groundbreaking motion capture technology that blended CGI and live-action footage, something that in and of itself proved controversial, to bring the chilled and beautiful world of Antarctic penguins to life. The film also features some great earworms with a soundtrack of hits from Prince, Elvis Presley, and Queen.
Other Animated Movies Now Streaming
November has already brought tons of great animated films to streaming. In addition to Happy Feet, HBO Max subscribers can now stream Ice Age: Continental Drift and Puss In Boots. Over at Tubi, films including Shrek Forever After, The Smurfs, The Smurfs 2, and The Smurfs: The Lost Village are streaming for free.
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