Feature Animation chopped back to 3 nominees?

Gloomy news. As several sharp readers here noted last week, Evangeline 1.0 had its premiere in Japan over 2 years ago, so it’s too late to the party. Tom O’Neil at Gold Derby confirms on word from the film’s co-distributor, Eleven Arts. That reduces the number of confirmed feature length animated releases to 15, one short of the magic number. (Unless A Town Called Panic comes along to shake things up again.)

In a year as strong for animation as 2009, seems as if there should be some other criteria besides basic math to determine the number of nominees. But I guess an evaluation of quality is asking too much. Can of worms, that. If quality were a factor for category shrinkage, not as many Hollywood songwriters would get a free bus pass to the Kodak year after year. And then we’d lose the spectacular highlight of the Annual Best Song Talent Show Extravaganza.