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. #0051, from 2003, follows a nervous clownfish searching the ocean for his lost son, helped along by a forgetful blue fish. It won the Best Animated Feature Oscar and was, for years, the best-selling home video ever released. #0023, from 2008, is set on an abandoned, rubbish-choked Earth and follows a small waste-collecting robot left behind to tidy it. Its first stretch runs almost without dialogue, carried by sound and expression, and it won the same award. #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. It won too, so all three of the Pixar answers are Oscar winners.

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. #0029, from 1994, is the story of a young lion and the uncle who wants him gone, and it was the highest-grossing traditionally animated film for years afterwards. Both leaned hard on their songs, and both are films people can hum long before they can name, which makes them satisfying puzzles: the artwork gives away the era and the studio, but the exact title can still be hard to place.

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 a video game and animated in a striking painted style that won it a wide audience well beyond players. #0013 is an adult animated comedy, a long-running series about a reckless scientist and his grandson bouncing between dimensions, with a following who will name it from almost nothing.

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.