<div><p>LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The animation category at this year's Oscars ceremony presents a crowded field of singing frogs, sly foxes and spunky kids, but despite some tough competition, the high-flying adventure movie "Up" is expected to float away with the Oscar.</p><p>Disney/Pixar's "Up" this week became the only animated film apart from 1991's "Beauty and the Beast" to land a best picture nod, and the movie about a boy and an old man who fly off in a house tied to balloons is also nominated in the animated category.</p><p>There, it's up against Twentieth Century Fox's "Fantastic Mr. Fox," the Walt Disney Co's "The Princess and the Frog," Focus Features' "Coraline" and European production "The Secret of Kells," which critics say was a surprise choice, because it played in only a handful of U.S. theaters.</p><p>Filmmakers and critics say the nominated movies are all very different, all very good, and rival the dramas in the coveted best picture category.</p><p>"Animation actually outdid the live-action movies this year, it's an extraordinarily competitive field in terms of quality," said Peter Hammond, a critic with Los Angeles Times awards tracker TheEnvelope.com.</p><p>But Hammond said "Up" is the "overwhelming favorite" in the animated category.</p><p>The five animated movies include two that came out in 3-D ("Up" and "Coraline"), two made with tiny figurines manipulated through a painstaking process called stop-motion ("Fantastic Mr. Fox" and "Coraline") and two hand-drawn films ("The Princess and the Frog" and "The Secret of Kells").</p><p>"It's really cool, because I feel like a number of years ago all the films were in the same zone, all trying to do the same type of thing," said Pete Docter, co-director of "Up," which was made with computer-generated imagery.</p><p>"And now it's so many different approaches to it, that it shows that animation is in a healthy place," Docter said.</p><p>OSCAR DRAWS WIDE</p><p>The Oscar field for animation was widened to five films this year, from its usual three, because of the amount of eligible films.</p><p>Even so, Tom O'Neil of TheEnvelope.com said some high-quality films failed to make the list, most notably Oscar winning Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki's "Ponyo."</p><p>Henry Selick, the director of "Coraline," agrees.</p><p>"'Up' is a masterpiece and most likely will win, but there's a lot of great animated films, many of which did not get in the list of five nominees," he said.</p><p>For his part, Selick said that to compete with the likes of Disney/Pixar, he had to "take a chance on a different sort of story, a different sort of look."</p><p>"Coraline" is about a young girl who escapes mom and dad through a magical passageway in her home, but finds things were better with her real parents.</p><p>For the film, Selick hired one crew member whose only job was to knit miniature sweaters for the characters.</p><p>"The Princess and the Frog," a musical about a New Orleans waitress who falls in love with a foreign prince-turned-frog, is Disney's first hand-drawn animated film in six years.</p><p>The film has made more than $100 million in the U.S. and Canada since its November release, and the Oscar nomination could help as it expands its overseas roll-out, which Disney said has already brought in more than $100 million.</p><p>It looks like a success now, but in making "The Princess and the Frog" Disney was taking a chance that audiences would again go for a hand-drawn film, after years in which Pixar-style computer animation set the standard.</p><p>(Editing by Jill Serjeant)</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=68393543&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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