SUBMITTED BY uruseiranma

February 6, 2003 —

With the days winding down to the announcement of this year's Academy Award nominations, several papers have been debating not about who will win Best Picture, but also the most recently created category: Best Animated Feature Film.

Last year's first Oscar in this category went to PDI/Dreamworks' Shrek, and this year, it seems like it could be a close race, but is Disney holding back on Spirited Away, and supposedly favoring their own American-made releases Lilo & Stitch and Treasure Planet? That's what the New York Times is wondering in their article. In their article, Oren Aviv, the president of marketing for Disney's distribution arm claims "From the screening program to our ads and to our cable buys  to everything  we've treated all our children equally. We have not favored one over another, and we haven't by any stretch of the imagination done anything other than embrace all of our films."

In terms of what goes for equal treatment, the films may be getting equality in the trade ads (i.e. ads in high-profile entertainment magazines like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter), but when it came to distribution last year, Disneey seemed rather stingy, launching Lilo & Stitch and Treasure Planet in an average of 2500 theaters, and releasing them at prime areas (summer and Thanksgiving). Their treatment of Spirited Away had the film playing mainly to art house theaters, and showed on a maximum of 150 theater screen at the end of SeptemberTuck Everlasting).

In Japan, Stephen M Alpert, a distributor for Hayao Miyazaki's and other works from Studio Ghibli (where Spirited Away was made), was quoted as saying ""I do feel that Disney is doing an adequate job. In fact, they're doing a great job, given the limitations inherent in the way they chose to release the film. Of course, I would have loved them to go out on 2,000 screens and give the general public a better chance to encounter the film. But there are a lot of pros and cons to taking that approach."

The possibility of a rerelease into more theaters beyond the previous 150 has been passed around for awhile now, including several articles from The New York Post. In the past, most films that were pulled before they won the Oscar soon expanded into smaller markets and such after winning the prestigious award (including films like Shine and Life is Beautiful). Mr. Aviv does give a small consideration to this fact: "Once the results are in for the Oscars, we, of course, will take another look at releasing the movie."

But even so, there are lingernig thoughts to this rerelease. Some fear that the films' Japanese themes (such as bathhouses, spirits of radishes, water and so forth) may hinder it, even with top talent doing an English dub, under the supervision of John Lasseter (Toy Story 1 & 2, A Bug's Life) and Kirk Wise (Beauty and the Beast). And of course, there is the ominous fear of war brewing on the horizon.

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