The nominations for the 37th annual Annie Awards, one of the highlights of the awards in the animation world, have been announced. It will be no surprise to anyone that the Best Animated Feature category is dominated by major works -- Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs ( Sony Pictures Animation), Coraline ( Laika), Fantastic Mr. Fox (20th Century Fox), The Princess and the Frog (Walt Disney Animation Studios), Up (Pixar Animation Studios) -- but I’m also delighted to see Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon also in the running for the lovely The Secret of Kells. Sadly we still seem to be waiting for Kells to get a proper UK release, many months after it showed in Europe (it also had a presence at Angouleme last January). I was lucky enough to see it at the Edinburgh Film Festival during the summer (review here) and thought it was a beautiful piece of animation with some gorgeous artwork; come on some distributor, get this out into UK cinemas so everyone can enjoy it, please! Don’t just take my word for it, its got an Annie nomination and it took the Standard Life Audience Award at the prestigious Edinburgh Film Festival, so obviously a lot of other people rate it too, so why isn’t it being shown here?!?!
It has some strong competition though -- Coraline was wonderful and Up had a real emotional hit as well as some fabulous Pixar animation (and a Kirk Douglas-alike bad guy in a Zepplin with talking dogs!). Frog and Cloudy I didn’t catch but I did take in Fantastic Mr Fox and loved it for going proper old school with the stop motion animation; regular readers will know I love most forms of animation, but there’s something especially lovely about stop-motion methods, knowing that every single thing you see on screen, from the characters themselves down to little newspapers on the table have been made my hand, placed there by hand, that everything has been touched and moved by someone painstakingly; frame by frame, that always adds something to the enjoyment of the medium for me.
On the Home Entertainment front Curious George: A Very Monkey Christmas (Universal Animation Studios), Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder ( The Curiosity Company in association with 20th Century Fox), Green Latern: First Flight ( Warner Bros. Animation), Open Season 2 ( Sony Pictures Animation) and SpongeBob vs. The Big One ( Nickelodeon) are going head to head, while in the Short Subject category the always great Robot Chicken is in contention for Star Wars 2.5 and, unsurprisingly the Simpsons have a nom in the Animated Television production category. I’m surprised not to see the wonderful Studio Ghibli in the Best Feature Film section however, although the wizard that is Hayao Miyazaki is nominated in the Directing in a Feature Production category for Ponyo, up against Wes Anderson for Fantastic Mr Fox, Henry Selick for Coraline, Pete Docter for Up and Christopher Miller and Phil Lord for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. The full list of nominations can be found on the Annies site; the awards will be given out on February 6th in LA.
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December 3rd, 2009 at 2:13 am
[...] The nominee lists for the annual film animation awards have been released. As expected, Coraline is amongst them. Joe Gordon has some commentary. [...]