Animation in the back catalogue

Animation turns up more often than people expect in KINO, and not only the obvious family films. A drawn or rendered film gets treated exactly like everything else here, with the same five clues and the same chance to be the answer of the day. So far the animated answers run from the Disney classics to modern Pixar to grown-up television. Here they are, by number.

Pixar show up three times, and all three won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. #0051, from 2003, follows a nervous clownfish searching the ocean for his captured son, with Ellen DeGeneres as the forgetful fish who tags along. It was the highest-grossing animated film ever made at the time, took around nine hundred and forty million dollars, and was for years the best-selling home video ever released, and Roger Ebert gave it four stars out of four. #0023, from 2008, is set on a rubbish-choked, abandoned Earth and follows a small waste-collecting robot left behind to tidy it, its first forty minutes running almost without a word, carried by sound and movement. It drew six Oscar nominations, as many as any animated film had ever managed, and the Los Angeles film critics named it the best picture of the year, the first time that group had handed a cartoon its top prize. #0033, from 2017, is built around the Mexican Day of the Dead, following a boy who crosses into the land of the departed to untangle his family's history with music. Pixar researched it in Mexico across several years, it won two Oscars including one for its central song, and it became the highest-earning film ever released in Mexico.

Then the Disney classics. #0045, from 1992, is the hand-drawn musical about a street thief who finds a magic lamp, made at the peak of the studio's early-nineties run and carried by Robin Williams as the spirit inside it. #0029, from 1994, is the story of a young cub driven out by the uncle who wants him gone, and his return to claim his place, and it stayed the highest-grossing hand-drawn animated film ever made for decades afterward. Both leaned hard on their songs, both won Oscars for their music, and both are films people can hum long before they can name, which is what makes them fair puzzles. The artwork gives away the era and the studio, but the exact title can still sit just out of reach.

Animation is not only for children, and two of the answers make the point. #0022 is a series rather than a film, spun off from an enormously popular online game and animated by a French studio in a painted, hand-worked style that won it an audience far beyond players. Its first season holds a rare hundred-per-cent critics' score, and it won four Emmys, becoming the first streaming series and the first video-game adaptation ever to take the award for best animated programme. #0013 is an adult comedy, created by Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland out of a crude short parodying Back to the Future, following a reckless scientist and his grandson as they bounce between dimensions. It has won that same Emmy twice, beating long-established rivals to it, and it has gathered a following who will name it from almost nothing, memorably enough that fans once sent a fast-food chain scrambling to bring back a discontinued sauce the show had mentioned in passing.

For a puzzle, animation behaves differently from live action. The artwork clue points to it almost at once, because a drawn or rendered frame looks nothing like a photographed one, and the genre confirms it a step later. That flips the game around: instead of working out whether a title is animated, you are working out which studio made it and which story it is telling. Bright, clean colour usually means Disney or Pixar, while a rougher or more stylised look points somewhere else. A television running time rules out the films entirely.

If you want to test that, #0051 and #0023 are a good pair to start with. Both are near-universally seen and both give the studio away in the artwork, yet they still make people reach for the name.