Last year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated three CGI-animated movies for best animated feature, and the pundits proclaimed the death of traditional animation. But those death notices were premature: This year, digital ones and zeros took a back seat to clay, models and hand-drawn characters.

The Academy's animation branch ignored such CGI boxoffice heavies as "Madagascar," "Chicken Little" and "Robots" in favor of Hayao Miyazaki's hand-drawn "Howl's Moving Castle," Tim Burton and Mike Johnson's stop-motion "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" and Nick Park and Steve Box's clay-animated "Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit."

A three-time Oscar winner for his short films, Aardman Animations director Park earned his first feature Oscar nom with "Wallace." "I admire a lot of the computer-animated films this year," he said. "I found it very interesting that the Academy (didn't) choose the most commercially successful (animated films) this year."

Bill Kroyer, governor of the Academy's animation branch, said the group isn't swayed by the popular vote at the boxoffice.

"The branch is not choosing movies because of commercial popularity or financial success," he said. "They're choosing because of the art of animation and what is being done to extend the medium from the animator's viewpoint."

This year's Oscar-nominated toons all share a handmade quality and distinct directorial vision. Unlike this year's computer-animated films, the three nominees challenge the medium, Kroyer said.

"They do it in different ways," he explained. " 'Wallace and Gromit' is an overwhelmingly strong character piece; 'Corpse Bride' sets a cinematic mood and style that is so beautiful and strong, some of us think it should have gotten a cinematography nomination; Miyazaki is the most visually rich storyteller today. Miyazaki's vision is free from any constraint, he's not limited by anything. By comparison, the average computer-animated movie lives on gags, fast action and polished effects, but they may not stand out as films that push the medium," he said.

"There's a certain part of me that would like to say this is a clear rejection of CG and stop-motion will rule the world, but that's not likely," said Henry Selick, supervising director at Laika Entertainment in Portland, Ore., where he is directing the stop-motion and CG film "Coraline." "If Pixar had a film this year, it's very likely you would have seen a computer-animated film in this race."

Said "Corpse Bride" producer Allison Abbate: "I don't think of movies in terms of the medium, but I know people get fixated on the medium. I certainly get frustrated by the fixation on CGI. If you have a story that's best told in CGI, then tell it. But what I hope to see from this is a greater faith in other modes of animation."

Abbate added that during production, the most outspoken supporters of "Corpse Bride" were computer-animation crews from Pixar. The studio's head of story, Joe Ranft, who died in August, was one of the film's executive producers.

Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, owner and CEO of the Gotham Group, noted that despite the dominance of computer animation in the popular imagination, computer animators are great defenders of handmade animation because they are familiar with the effort that goes into making them.

"The industry has had a tendency to focus on CGI lately," Goldsmith-Vein said. "But that doesn't mean that computer animators aren't still sitting in their offices all day long, drawing. There's a lot of handmade work that goes into computer animation, and it takes a lot of drawing and a village of people to get good ideas into the computer."

Still, Selick noted, the computer has a tendency to denude that human touch, which is why the Academy's recognition of the films it chose this year is significant.

"With both the (stop-motion) movies and 'Howl's,' the artist's hand is right in there," Selick said. "People pushed clay around to make great expression in 'Wallace and Gromit'; people manipulated faces and arms for the (stop-motion) on 'Corpse Bride,' 95% of which was done by hand. What you see in 'Howl's,' the artist drew the lines that were inked and painted. Those were done by humans. I still feel a distinct difference in the artist's touch when I watch those movies."

Aardman Animations, which has traditionally been a stop-motion animation studio, is making its first feature-length foray into computer animation with DreamWorks' "Flushed Away" later this year. Despite the move to digital filmmaking at Aardman, Park maintains his loyalty to clay.

"We could have done the 'Were-Rabbit' in CGI," Park said. "But we chose not to because I find with traditional (stop-motion) techniques and clay there is a certain magic that happens whenever the frame is hand-manipulated. I just love clay; it's an expression."