The 2014 Annie nominations
Monday, December 1, 2014 at 4:00PM Tim here, with the second wave of the day's "the year is ending! give out all awards right away!" news. ASIFA-Hollywood announced the nominees for the 42nd Annie Awards, honoring achievments in theatrical, telvision, and now video game animation. With 36 categories, we don't have space to look at nearly all of them, but here are three that matter for future awards prognostication:
Best Animated Feature
BIG HERO 6
THE BOOK OF LIFE
THE BOXTROLLS
CHEATIN'
HOW TO TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2
THE LEGO MOVIE
SONG OF THE SEA
THE TALE OF THE PRINCESS KAGUYA
Nomination leader THE BOXTROLLS
Best Animated Short Subject
CODA (on the Oscar shortlist)
THE DAM KEEPER (on the Oscar shortlist)
DUET (on the Oscar shortlist)
FEAST (on the Oscar shortlist)
INSIDE HOMER - The Simpsons Couch Gag, Episode #549
ME AND MY MOULTON (on the Oscar shortlist)
THE RAVEN
SILENT
Animated Effects in a Live-Action Production
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2
EDGE OF TOMORROW
THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG (yep, the one from last year)
NOAH
TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION
X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
The nominators were enormously kind to Laika and The Boxtrolls: that film comfortably leads the pack with 13 nominations (with multiple nominations in a handful of categories). Next up is How to Train Your Dragon 2 with 10, while Big Hero 6, Song of the Sea, and The Lego Movie come up with 7, 7, and 6, respectively. That could easily be your ultimate Oscar slate, though I expect critics groups to split between The Lego Movie and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, which netted just three nominations.
Reader Comments (7)
that's a lot of overlap on the short film finalist list. interesting to see because i think that's not usually the case if i'm remembering correctly.
yay for The Boxtrolls.
I love that the Annie committee just nominate however many movies they feel like. They really liked 8 movies this year so they nominated 8 movies.
I'll be really disappointed if BIG HERO 6 makes the Oscar five though. It's like... come on! What is that film doing that is interesting in the slightest?!? They have the chance to give first time nominations to the likes of Takahata, Moore, Plympton and the Laika guys and they're gonna nominate... BIG HERO 6? Jesus christ.
Interesting that THE LEGO MOVIE didn't get any voice acting nominations. Interesting since that was one of the things it did so well - casting. I think the somewhat weaker showing of that movie proves my suspicion correct that maybe those within the animation branch may not be as keen on the movie as everyone else, yet if it's nominated it'll win easily.
Lastly, I do wonder how the storyboard categories are judged. Is it based on the quality of the actual drawings? How similar they then were to the finished product...
I get The LEGO Movie missing character animation and design. I'd guess the former would encourage voters to think on smoothness of movement (Lego can't look like it's moving too smoothly or it doesn't look like a brickfilm) and the latter would encourage voters to think on making new varied designs look like they belong in the same world (again, Lego is a bit too limited), but netting not even one voice acting nod stings. We can't even get the satisfaction of Kristin Chenoweth (didn't pretty much everyone agree she was best in show?) getting that Rio 2 nod. Not that Rio 2 deserved that nod at all, but, still, c'mon! But it's not like we shouldn't have expected the Lego Movie to not get a nod here. They do have terrible enough taste in voice acting to view Dawn French's performance in Coraline as more worthy than Teri Hatcher's and the Minions as more worthy than Kristen Bell in Frozen.
I hope that Princess Kaguya can end up in the final nomination batch. It's such a beautiful and emotionally powerful film. Yet I'm worried that it will be like in 2009 when Tomm Moore gets the token foreign/indie nomination amongst the big studio and Laika films.
Glenn: Racial diversity? Beyond that, I don't know if there's anything else special.
Glenn: Also: The Academy DID nominate Tomm Moore before. Does everyone just forget that Kells happened in 2009?
I certainly remembered he'd been nominated before, I forgot I wrote "first time".
As for BIG HERO 6 and "racial diversity". Well, those were certainly the whitest people of Asian descent I have ever seen.