Annie Nominations Embrace "Coco" and "The Breadwinner"
Monday, December 4, 2017 at 10:48PM
NATHANIEL R in Annie Awards, Bob's Burgers, Coco, Despicable Me, Loving Vincent, Oscars (17), TV, The Boss Baby, The Breadwinner, The Lego Batman Movie, Trollhunters, animated films

by Nathaniel R

Coco and The Breadwinner are the top competitors for the Annies (and maybe the Oscars)

The Annie Awards first began handing out prizes in 1992 but weren't quite on a calendar year yet with Beauty and The Beast, a 1991 film, honored in that inaugural year. They've since aligned themselves to the calendar and last year their top prize went to Zootopia, which also took the Oscar. Coco l eads their nominations for 2017 and also presumably leads the Oscar race with The Breadwinner  the widely admired darkhorse at both. Presumably again as we won't know what the Oscar nominations are until January 23rd. 

Both of the leaders are powerfully rooted in cultural specificity (Mexico and Afghanistan respectively) and are, in their own way, tearjerkers, rather than the more traditionally glib action comedies that tend to be the bread and butter of the animated film world... at least in America.

We'd love to raise a glass to the nominations for the streaming series Trollhunters which we're huge fans of but we'd rather throw the contents of that glass inb Annie's face for preferencing Cars 3 and Despicable Me 3 over the insanity of The Lego Batman Movie. If you wanted to honor a sequel, that's really the way you wanna go? The complete list of nominees and a few more comments, cheers, and jeers are after the jump...

Best Animated Feature

The absence of The Lego Batman Movie is annoying given the thinness of the competition. Coco takes this one with ease. 

Best Animated Feature-Independent

Loving Vincent has been a solid hit in arthouse release and The Big Bad Fox and The Breadwinner both look like real contenders for the annual foreign spots in the Oscar lineup. The question is how much room Oscar will make for the non American CG titles. 

Best Animated Special Production

Disney has already announced that their pulling Olaf's Frozen Adventure from theaters (in the wake of many complaints about its length -- complaints which surely wouldn't have been lodged in the first place if people had actually loved the short). But those audience complaints about the "short" before Coco apparently didn't reach the nominators ears since they gave it 3 nominations. (sigh)

Best Animated Short Subject

Dear Basketball and Negative Space are both on the 10 wide finalist list for Oscar but the rest of these aren't. More on that list tomorrow.

Best Animated Television/Broadcast Commercial

Best Animated Television/Broadcast Production For Preschool Children

peg + cat

Best Animated Television/Broadcast Production For Children

Best General Audience Animated Television/Broadcast Production

The ghost of Freddie Mercury on BIG MOUTH

BIG MOUTH! That 'Am I Gay?' episode is one of the best ones in that delightfully raunchy series about unruly teenage hormones.

Best Student Film

Keep an eye out for Cradle which is the only one of these that's also on the 10 wide Oscar finalist list.

Animated Effects in an Animated Production

 

Avatar Flight of Passage was so amazing. Not sure it's worth the hours and hours of waiting so do it Fast Pass at Disney World. Totally worth it on Fast Pass.

 

Character Animation in an Animated Television / Broadcast Production


 

Have I ever told you I love love love Trollhunters? Probably. I would have written about it but there are a ton of episodes so way too many to write about.

 

Character Animation in an Animated Feature Production

 

Strange that the character animation awards dont seem to have any rhyme or reason (see the others in that field of animation as this list continues). Sometimes the same film gets multiple nominations. Sometimes the characters are "all" sometimes "various" and sometimes specific characters are named. Shouldn't the awards be divvied up in this same way? One award for individual characters, one for more general character animation qualities, etcetera?

 

Character Animation in a Live Action Production

Valerian and the city of a thousand planets

 

 

Character Animation in a Video Game

 

 

Character Design in an Animated Television / Broadcast Production

Queen Usurna in Trollhunters

 

 

Character Design in an Animated Feature Production


 

 

Directing in an Animated Television / Broadcast Production

 

 

Directing in an Animated Feature Production


 

Interesting that this is a combo list of the main top category and its indie counterpart but then Lego Batman is thrown in for fun. Okay.

 

Music in an Animated Television / Broadcast Production

 

 

Music in an Animated Feature Production

 

 

Production Design in an Animated Television / Broadcast Production

 

 

Production Design in an Animated Feature Production

mary and the witches flower

 

 

Weird that Ferdinand and Leap! and Mary and the Witch's Flower all showed up here and nowhere else. Did the Production Design nominating committee have access to more films than all the other categories or were they just feeling contrarian?

Storyboarding in an Animated Television / Broadcast Production

 

 

Storyboarding in an Animated Feature Production

 

 

Voice Acting in an Animated Television / Broadcast Production

 

 

That Maya Rudolph wasn't nominated here for "Hormone Monstress" in Big Mouth makes this whole category absolutely useless. One of the most inspired voice performances I've ever heard.

Voice Acting in an Animated Feature Production


 

 

Really good category here with deserving nominees across the board.

Writing in an Animated Television / Broadcast Production

 

 

Writing in an Animated Feature Production


 

 

Why are their only 4 nominations in this category when all the other categories have 5? Press release mistake? Copy and paste mistake? Internet sharing mistake? Annie mistake?

Editorial in an Animated Television / Broadcast Production

 

 

Editorial in an Animated Feature Production

 

 

What do you make of the Annie nominations this year?

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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