Golden Globes: ‘Missing Link’ Wins Best Animated Feature

The HFPA presented the 77th Golden Globe award ceremony on Sunday night, kicking the Hollywood awards season into high gear. Ricky Gervais returned to the podium to host the celebration of feature film and television achievement, which included honoring Tom Hanks with the Cecil B. DeMille Award and Ellen DeGeneres with the Carol Burnett Award.

The Best Animated Feature prize went to LAIKA’s globe trotting stop-motion adventure Missing Link, directed and written by Chris Butler. This marks the Oregon-based studio’s first Golden Globe win, despite prior nominations for Coraline, The Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings.

Reacting to the honor, LAIKA President & CEO and producer Travis Knight, writer/director Chris Butler and producer Arianne Sutner said:

“For a stop-motion movie to be recognized in this way, alongside such amazing animated films, means everything to the LAIKA community of animators and craftspeople. The strength of the universe of animation is its diversity – of people, of voices, and of styles. We are honored to play our small part in that. This award is not just for all the storytellers, artists, creators and performers of LAIKA who helped bring this story to life, but for all those who support stop-motion animation and original storytelling in all its forms.”

This was quite an achievement for LAIKA’s stop-motion and CG-animated feature, which had stiff competition from Disney’s Frozen 2, Pixar’s Toy Story 4 and DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.The HFPA added a twist to the category by also nominating Jon Favreau’s The Lion King , which is computer animated, but was not positioned as an animated film by Disney.

The Golden Globes have a strong winning correlation with the Oscars animated feature picks. The same movie has won both awards 10 times since the Globe category was introduced in 2006, including in 2019 when Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse snagged so many awards in its web.

Exceptions to this trend are the first year, when Globe winner Cars was passed over in favor of George Miller’s Happy Feet by the Academy; 2011, when Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin took the Globe and Gore Verbinski’s Rango won the Oscar; and 2014, when the Globe went to DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon 2 and the Oscar to Disney’s Marvel-inspired hit Big Hero 6.

Best Animated Feature

• Frozen 2 (Disney)
• How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (DreamWorks, Universal)
• The Lion King (Disney)
• WINNER Missing Link (LAIKA/Annapurna, United Artists)
• Toy Story 4 (Disney/Pixar)

Best Original Song

• “Beautiful Ghosts” (Cats) Andrew Lloyd Webber, Taylor Swift
• WINNER “I’m Gonna Love Me Again” (Rocketman) Elton John, Bernie Taupin
• “Into the Unknown” (Frozen 2) Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Robert Lopez —
• “Spirit” (The Lion King) Timothy McKenzie, Ilya Salmanzadeh, Beyoncé —
• “Stand Up” (Harriet) Joshuah Brian Campbell, Cynthia Erivo

Missing Link director Chris Butler and producer Arianne Sutner backstage at the Golden Globes