One of this year’s Oscar nominees is a true triple threat: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has recognized Flee, a Danish animated documentary, for all three of those qualities. Announcers Leslie Jordan and Tracee Ellis Ross revealed Tuesday morning that the film has been nominated for the Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film, Best Documentary Feature, and Best Animated Feature. This makes it the first movie ever to be nominated in all three categories.
In Flee—or Flugt as it’s titled in Danish—director Jonas Poher Rasmussen interviews his friend, a gay Afghani man living in Copenhagen, about his childhood in Soviet-controlled Afghanistan in the 1980s and his family’s escape, first to Russia and then to western Europe. The movie, which is in theaters and available to rent on services like Amazon Prime Video, is Denmark’s official entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (previously known as Best Foreign Language Film).
With the exception of some live-action archival footage, Flee is almost entirely animated. That format enabled director Jonas Poher Rasmussen to keep his subject’s identity a secret. (Amin Nawabi, the name used in the film, is a pseudonym.)
In recent years, two movies have been nominated before in two of these categories. In 2020, Honeyland made history as the first movie to be nominated for the Academy Awards for both Best International Feature Film and Best Documentary Feature. In 2021, Romania’s Collective was also nominated in both categories. This makes Flee’s nomination in both those categories the extension of a three-year streak, as documentaries continue to gain wider recognition.
However, since Best Animated Feature was introduced as a category in 2001, only one non-English-language animated feature has won—Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, in 2002—with Disney-Pixar often dominating the category. (Flee is up against three films from the studio this year: Luca, Encanto, and Raya and the Last Dragon.)
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No movie has ever been nominated for both Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature Film, though two animated movies, 2008’s Waltz With Bashir and 2013’s The Missing Picture, have been nominated for Best International Feature Film. Both of those movies are also, as it happens, documentaries, but they weren’t nominated for either Best Animated Film or Best Documentary Feature. In the latter category, Waltz With Bashir was deemed ineligible, on a technicality that had nothing to do with being animated or in a language other than English. (It hadn’t received a qualifying run in a New York theater before the deadline.)
Still, at a time when more foreign movies are being taken more seriously in other categories (with Parasite becoming the first non-English-language movie to win Best Picture in 2020), when animated movies are being treated as not just for kids, and when documentaries are becoming not just more respected but more experimental, Flee’s hat trick makes a certain amount of sense.
