The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

The final shortlist nominations for the 80th annual Academy Awards – better known as the Oscars – have been announced. As with this year’s BAFTAs and Golden Globes there isn’t much from the fantastic or comics-based genres, which are mostly confined to the more technical awards such as Best Visual Effects (Transformers, the Golden Compass and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End), although Johnny Depp did garner a nomination in the prestigious Best Actor category for Sweeney Todd. Persepolis did not make both the Best Foreign Language and Best Animated Feature Film cateogies, as many speculated it might (which would have been pretty astonishing), but it is in the running for the Best Animated Feature Film, alongside Ratatouille and Surf’s Up (I know most of us haven’t seen Persepolis yet in the UK but I still think it would be terrific to see it win).

(a scene from the National Film Board of Canada’s award-winning Madame Tutli-Putli, nominated for the Best Animated Short Film)

There are five films competing for the Best Animated Short Film Oscar this year – I Met the Walrus, Madame Tutli-Putli, Meme Les Pigeons Vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven), My Love (Moya Lyubov) and Peter & the Wolf. Regular readers may recall that the National Film Board of Canada’s Madame Tutli-Putli – a gorgeous-looking stop-motion professional debut from Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski – won not one but two awards at last year’s Cannes Festival (see here). I haven’t seen Meme Les Pigeons or Moya Lyubov yet, but Suzie Templeton’s Peter & the Wolf is a worthy contender, a quite lovely piece of animation, while you may remember me mentioning Josh Raskin’s brilliant I Met the Walrus on here almost a year ago when the good folks at Drawn flagged it up – its a lovely piece animating an old interview by a 14-year old with John Lennon; if you watch closely you’ll notice all sorts of references to the Beatles-era slipped in there.

Update: Drawn! has a nice feature on all of the short animation nominees complete with trailers and – in the case of Meme Les Pigeons – the whole film to view. (link via Journalista)