The Oscars have a geography problem, and Animation Obsessive is naming it plainly: the most artistically significant animated feature of 2025 will not be competing next Sunday, and the most commercially successful one won't be there either. Both are Chinese. Neither absence is accidental.
The newsletter's case study is Nobody — a $10 million 2D film from director Yu Shui that earned nearly $250 million in China, moved theater audiences to tears, and has circulated in subtitled form primarily through unofficial YouTube uploads for audiences outside China. Animation Obsessive calls it "our favorite mainstream movie we've seen from 2025" and argues it "belongs on any list of last year's best animation." That's not a minor claim. And the fact that it won't be competing against Zootopia 2 or KPop Demon Hunters raises questions worth sitting with — about the Academy's eligibility mechanics, about the geography of animation prestige, and about what gets to count as universal.
The Qualified and the Absent
Animation Obsessive is careful not to lay the blame entirely at the Academy's feet. The piece acknowledges that Nobody's failure to make the Oscar longlist was likely a qualification problem — its American theatrical release wasn't structured to meet the eligibility requirements. Nezha 2, the record-breaking sequel that out-earned every film on earth during 2025, reportedly wasn't even submitted. These are industry logistics failures as much as Academy blind spots.
But the editors allow themselves a pointed observation: even granting all of that, "this year's Oscars feel a bit provincial." The largest animated feature of 2025 won't be there. And neither, they argue, will arguably the finest. That word — provincial — is doing real work. It suggests not malice but insularity, a nominations slate that reflects what gets properly distributed and properly submitted in English-language markets, not what actually moved audiences or advanced the art form globally.
The structural issue here runs deeper than any single film. Oscar eligibility for animated features requires a qualifying theatrical run in Los Angeles County. That gatekeeping mechanism was designed to ensure the Academy was voting on films, not streaming content or YouTube phenomena — but it has the side effect of privileging whatever distribution infrastructure a film's producers have in the American market. Chinese studios, even ones producing work at the highest level, often lack that infrastructure. The result is a category that can credibly claim to represent the best of world animation while systematically excluding the world's largest animation industry.
Yu Shui and the Long Apprenticeship
Animation Obsessive traces Yu Shui's career with the kind of attention usually reserved for auteurs the Western press has already canonized. The portrait is of a director who spent decades in the margins of a weak industry, teaching at a Beijing university while animation remained "an indie side project." His student film won prizes in 2004. His Flash series built a modest following. But the Chinese animation industry of those years couldn't sustain the kind of director-driven work he wanted to make.
The piece quotes Yu directly on the experience: "At the beginning, I had nothing and worked alone." What follows is a slow accumulation — allies gathered, opportunities sought, the industry gradually strengthening around him. His break came through Shanghai Animation Film Studio's 2023 anthology of shorts, where a Nobody short he directed "blew up" and became unexpectedly mainstream. He was already in his 40s.
The feature grew sideways from that short. Producers saw Yu's script in 2021 and asked him to develop it as a feature in parallel with the short's production. Art director Chen Liaoyu described the relationship between the two works carefully: "neither a prequel nor a sequel to the short... we've developed a completely new, parallel story." Same characters, same thematic territory, different story. The short proved the concept; the feature proved the director.
What the Film Is Actually About
The premise of Nobody is a comedy of imposture. A group of animal-monster outcasts — a boar, a toad, a weasel, and a gorilla — decide to pass themselves off as the legendary heroes of Journey to the West. Since none of them actually know what Sun Wukong and his companions look like, they hire a concept artist to sketch some options, then pick the lineup that feels right. Animation Obsessive describes the film as "very funny," noting that "even the drawings and movement are funny — often subtly, in ways not usually seen."
But the comedy is a vehicle. The frauds, in trying to live up to their pretend roles, actually begin to become something. "What begins as farce turns into halting, absurd, small-scale but real heroism," the piece writes. Chinese audiences reportedly wept. The film's arc, Animation Obsessive argues, requires no familiarity with Journey to the West to follow — the story of ordinary people pretending to be heroes until the pretending becomes real is not a Chinese story. It's a human one.
Yu frames the film's universalism explicitly. "Most of the world consists of 'nobodies,'" he told interviewers. "That's why their stories resonate so powerfully." And more personally: "Most people, myself included, are just ordinary individuals. But how do ordinary people establish themselves and navigate life? So many things are beyond our control — whether it's the demands of our career, family or society. Essentially, numerous external forces collectively shape our lives. The core message of our film is that: can you truly understand yourself and find your own path?"
That's a director speaking in the language of his own biography as much as his film's. The man who spent two decades on the margins of an industry, teaching to pay the bills while waiting for his chance, made a film about nobodies who discover they were capable of more than anyone — including themselves — expected.
Mythological Realism and the Shanghai Tradition
The aesthetic argument in Animation Obsessive is where the piece gets most specific, and most interesting. Yu's guiding concept for Nobody was what he called "mythological realism" — a grounded, everyday approach to Chinese mythological material. This affected character design, movement, backgrounds, and the fundamental logic of how the film inhabits space.
Chen Liaoyu explained the character design philosophy in terms that push directly against the homogenizing pull of contemporary mainstream animation: "If the little pig monster came out like Mickey Mouse, with elastic, smoothly flowing deformation and stretching, it would just be an American pig monster. But we want precisely the opposite: first, it needs a feeling of lived-in texture, a little bent and clumsy."
The backgrounds drew on ink-wash painting techniques studied from classical masters. The character designs referenced lianhuanhua comics — the illustrated sequential art form that was central to Chinese popular visual culture in the 20th century — particularly the work of artist Dai Dunbang. Yu himself spent time doing field research in Shanxi Province, his hometown, studying Buddhist temple craftsmanship. "I found the craftsmanship of these Buddhist statues to be deeply moving," he said. "The reason I incorporated these elements into the film is that they're grounded — they come from real life, from the world around us."
But the team wasn't making a heritage exercise. They also wanted cinematic space — the sense that characters exist in a solid, three-dimensional world. Traditional ink-wash painting minimizes Western ideas of light, shadow, and perspective. Nobody had to integrate both. As Chen put it: "we had to figure out how to integrate the effects of light and shadow within ink-wash painting... Beyond just the ink brushwork, we needed to add lighting, space and even texture. This approach allows the audience to appreciate the beauty of Chinese aesthetics while experiencing the intuitive realism of cinema."
Animation Obsessive draws a direct line from this working method to Shanghai Animation Studio's golden age — to films like Three Monks (1980), products of sustained research and deliberate craft decisions. The editors note that some of the surviving Shanghai Animation veterans served as consultants on Nobody, and their feedback shaped the final film. The old methodology, it turns out, still works.
"It's not that you can't be cool, but don't be cool for the sake of being cool, or show off for the sake of showing off; above all, you need to tell a good story."
Small Films, Rising Industries
Animation Obsessive closes its main argument by placing Nobody in a broader trend. The film cost under $10 million and earned 25 times that. Flow, the Latvian animated feature that won the Oscar last year, was made for even less. The piece argues that "the rise of small, thoughtful and risky animation is happening" — that there is a demonstrable audience for films that prioritize story over spectacle, that the untold stories are finding their way to screens.
That's an optimistic reading, and it's worth testing. Flow succeeded in part because it had no dialogue, making it trivially easy to release in any language market. Nobody is deeply verbal — its humor depends on the script, on the timing of the jokes, on the specific texture of its Chinese cultural references. Its international reach has been limited even by the standards of subtitled arthouse animation. The unofficial YouTube uploads that Animation Obsessive mentions aren't a distribution model; they're a workaround for the absence of one.
Critics might note that the piece slides somewhat too easily between two different arguments: the argument that Nobody deserved Oscar recognition, and the argument that the Oscar category's eligibility mechanics systematically exclude Chinese cinema. Both might be true simultaneously, but they have different implications. The first is an aesthetic judgment about one film. The second is a structural critique that would require changing how the Academy handles international animation — or how Chinese studios approach American distribution. Animation Obsessive gestures at the structural problem but doesn't dwell on what a solution would look like.
There's also a question the piece leaves open: why didn't Chinese studios submit either Nobody or Nezha 2? The piece notes that Nezha 2 "reportedly wasn't even submitted" and that Nobody's theatrical run "wasn't tuned to get it qualified," but doesn't explore what those decisions reflect. Are Chinese studios uninterested in Western awards validation? Are they skeptical of the Academy's openness to Chinese-language animation? Are there commercial or diplomatic calculations at play? The absence of an answer leaves the piece's implicit argument — that the Academy is missing something — incomplete. The Academy can only nominate what it receives.
The Newsbits and What They Signal
The newsletter's second section, a roundup of animation news, is worth reading alongside the Nobody piece rather than after it. Ireland's Cartoon Saloon has released a teaser for its next feature. A Rwandan animation project called Kigali Night screened at Cartoon Movie in France. A Spanish stop-motion short called Only Rats has a new trailer. In Cuba, animation workshops continue operating through power outages. An American animator became a MacDowell fellow. A British studio delivered a technically complex music video. A creator left her project to protest enforced generative AI use.
Taken together, these dispatches sketch an animation world that is genuinely global, financially precarious, and stubbornly productive. The Nobody piece and the newsbits reinforce each other: the works that matter are coming from everywhere, under every kind of constraint, using every available tool. The Oscars are one validation mechanism among many, and perhaps not even the most important one for the directors making the most interesting work.
Bottom Line
Nobody is, by Animation Obsessive's account, the best-kept secret in 2025 animation — a $10 million film that earned 25 times its budget on charm, craft, and a story about ordinary people pretending their way into meaning. The Oscar eligibility mechanics that kept it off the ballot are procedural rather than intentional, but the result is the same: the animated feature category will crown a winner next Sunday without having considered the year's most interesting argument for what the form can do. Animation Obsessive is right to call that provincial — and right to suggest that the audience for small, thoughtful, risky animation doesn't need an award to find it.