Cartoons FTW! There’s still a lot wrong with the Academy Awards — stunt performers continue to be ignored, as do people of color — but at least they've always had a category for Best Cartoon, even if they realized that they were grown-ups and changed it from "Cartoon" to the more respectable-sounding "Animated Film" in the 1970s. Let's state the obvious: The best American cartoon of 2015 is Don Hertzfeld's World of Tomorrow, in which a 4-year-old named Emily (Winona Mae) is visited by a third-generation clone of herself from the future (Julia Pott), who explains to her toddler-ancestor what the future holds for herself and humanity. Coming in a close second is Sanjay Patel's Sanjay's Super Team (this year's Disney-adjacent nomination, being produced by Pixar and shown before The Good Dinosaur), a charming autobiographical tale in which a young Indian-American boy imagines the Hindu gods Vishnu, Durga, and Hanuman as superheroes, setting a high bar for The Incredibles 2. One of Russia's largest animation studios produced Konstantin Bronzit's achingly sad We Can't Live Without Cosmos, in which two lifelong besties find their friendship put to the test as they contend with the rigors, scrutiny, and very real possibility of death while training to be cosmonauts. It can be tough in the world of tomorrow.
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