A favorite on the festival circuit - and winner of the Best Feature Theatrical Film Award at the 2001 World Animation Celebration -Production I.G's Blood: The Last Vampire wasn't even recognized by the Academy as an official submission, much less one of the four ineligible titles.

"Blood was submitted but rejected due to its length," explains Danielle Garnier, Marketing head at Manga Entertainment, the North American distributor for the full-digital, 45-minute feature. The Academy requires that an eligible feature be no less than 70 minutes in length. Looking back on the history of feature animation, the 64-minute Dumbo would have been ineligible for Oscar consideration. "We challenged the idea behind their new restrictions for an animated film and got some ink in the Hollywood Reporter." But thus far Blood remains one of the films left out in the cold, not even considered an official submission.

Among the shunted four, Disney's Atlantis is the most surprising. The Hollywood Reporter quoted Disney Spokesperson Heidi Trotta as saying that the company had originally submitted the film for Oscar consideration only to have the application sent back to them as incorrectly completed. At that time they chose not to resubmit the film, instead deciding to put all of Disney's weight behind Monsters, Inc.

Help, I'm a Fish failed to get a Los Angeles release before the Academy's deadline, leaving two films, both Japanese, excluded from eligibility by the time the Dec. 3 deadline hit. Viz/Bandai's Jin-Roh was originally screened in France in 1999 and therefore was excluded from nomination consideration on the grounds that it did not fall into the eligible time period, January 2000 to December 2001.

The rejection of Urban Vision's Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, though, was mired in contention. It was the "one" film that had neglected to fill out an Official Screenwriters' Credit (OSC) form, a charge Urban Vision's Marketing Director Rhona Medina feels unfairly knocked VHD out of the running.

"The form wasn't in the original packet they sent us and I found out later that you have to get it online," explains Medina. She goes on to describe wading through a sea of bureaucratic deference until being told on Dec. 11 that Vampire Hunter D had missed the Dec. 3 deadline to turn in the OSC form and therefore was ineligible for Oscar consideration. Upon further probing, Medina was told by Academy staff that they were not called about the missing form because that would have been tantamount to soliciting a submission. However, Medina was also told, by a completely different office at the Academy, that there was an instruction to call Urban Vision about the missing form before the deadline.

The Academy maintained a hard-nose stance. "While it's the responsibility of the filmmaker to read the rules regarding eligibility, which are pretty clear, this is a new category and miscommunication may have occurred on both sides," Pavlik explains.

A letter of complaint from Urban Vision to the Academy followed. "The form is no new information, it just has to be on a separate sheet of paper," Medina notes. "Apparently the Academy wants the credits listed in a particular order and Price Waterhouse wants it in a different order. But it's no new information. And if the form is used primarily for Price Waterhouse, they don't need it until after the three nominees are named. The information for the six movies that don't get nominated are going to be thrown out anyway. We don't feel as if the Academy should penalize us when we've demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that we're eager to complete the process and won't hold up the process by turning in the screenwriter credit form now."