This animated documentary just made Oscar nominations history.

A single of this year’s Oscar nominees is a correct triple danger: The Academy of Motion Photograph Arts and Sciences has regarded Flee, a Danish animated documentary, for all three of these qualities. Announcers Leslie Jordan and Tracee Ellis Ross disclosed Tuesday morning that the film has been nominated for the Academy Awards for Greatest International Attribute Movie, Most effective Documentary Characteristic, and Very best Animated Characteristic. This tends to make it the initial film at any time to be nominated in all 3 categories.

In Flee—or Flugt as it is titled in Danish—director Jonas Poher Rasmussen interviews his mate, a gay Afghani gentleman residing in Copenhagen, about his childhood in Soviet-managed Afghanistan in the 1980s and his family’s escape, 1st to Russia and then to western Europe. The motion picture, which is in theaters and obtainable to lease on providers like Amazon Primary Online video, is Denmark’s official entry for the Academy Award for Greatest International Aspect Movie (beforehand acknowledged as Ideal Overseas Language Movie).

With the exception of some dwell-motion archival footage, Flee is practically totally animated. That structure enabled director Jonas Poher Rasmussen to maintain his subject’s identification a mystery. (Amin Nawabi, the identify used in the film, is a pseudonym.)

In modern a long time, two flicks have been nominated before in two of these classes. In 2020, Honeyland built record as the very first movie to be nominated for the Academy Awards for equally Greatest International Feature Movie and Greatest Documentary Attribute. In 2021, Romania’s Collective was also nominated in both of those groups. This helps make Flee’s nomination in both of those those people groups the extension of a 3-12 months streak, as documentaries proceed to obtain broader recognition.

Having said that, given that Greatest Animated Function was released as a group in 2001, only a single non-English-language animated element has won—Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, in 2002—with Disney-Pixar normally dominating the group. (Flee is up against 3 films from the studio this year: Luca, Encanto, and Raya and the Previous Dragon.)

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No movie has at any time been nominated for both equally Finest Animated Aspect and Most effective International Aspect Movie, however two animated films, 2008’s Waltz With Bashir and 2013’s The Lacking Photo, have been nominated for Ideal Worldwide Aspect Film. Both of these movies are also, as it transpires, documentaries, but they weren’t nominated for possibly Greatest Animated Movie or Finest Documentary Function. In the latter classification, Waltz With Bashir was deemed ineligible, on a technicality that had nothing to do with getting animated or in a language other than English. (It hadn’t gained a qualifying operate in a New York theater ahead of the deadline.)

Continue to, at a time when more international films are being taken extra critically in other classes (with Parasite becoming the initial non-English-language motion picture to acquire Finest Photograph in 2020), when animated movies are being handled as not just for children, and when documentaries are starting to be not just much more revered but much more experimental, Flee’s hat trick helps make a certain quantity of perception.