FYC: "Ride Your Wave" for Best Animated Feature

by Cláudio Alves

There's nothing more wonderful about cinema, about art as a whole, than the ability to surprise. If I feel a film showed me sights I never thought possible, if it told me stories I could have never imagined, it instantly earns respect and a special place in my heart. Following that line of thinking, one must say that no other picture in this awards season surprised me quite as much as Masaaki Yuasa's Ride Your Wave. Mixing supernatural stylings and teenage melodrama, the Japanese director has managed to create one of the most painful portraits of loss and paralyzing grief in a long time. If you thought the sight of a girl talking to a water bottle would never make you tear up, think again…

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Interview: Pixar's Mike Jones on co-writing "Soul" and "Luca"

by Nathaniel R

Pixar's Soul centers around a music teacher Joe, who feels he missed his calling. He always wanted to be a famous jazz musician. Through the course of the spiritually minded adventure, which takes us from Earth to The Great Beyond and The Great Before and back again, Joe comes to understand that his calling was to teach. None us know ahead of time where our lives and career might take us. For instance, I was certain I was going to be an illustrator and ended up in Human Resources and now identify as a writer. This is also true of Pixar's Mike Jones. He was once on our side of the movie world as an entertainment journalist but always planned to shoot movies. "I went to NYU film school to be a cinematographer. You have to take a writing course as an undergrad and the teacher took me aside and said, 'You want to think about writing instead?'" Jones continued to pursue cinematography but, as it turns out, the teacher was right and the seed was planted "I did start to kind of write on my own. And after I got out of film school, I kept writing." This led him to a brief entertainment journalism career until he made the leap to filmmaking, if not in the way he originally intended. Years later he has a thriving career at Pixar as a screenwriter.

We recently spoke to him about the process of developing Soul and what it's like to be a co-writer since Pixar generally has several creatives on each film...

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Annie Award nominations: It's "Soul" vs "Wolfwalkers" again

by Nathaniel R

This just in: Soul and Wolfwalkers are tied for most nominations (10) for the 48th annual Annie Awards, honoring the best in animated entertainment. Onward is in a distant third place with 7 nominations. The Annie  ceremony will be virtual event this year, streamed live on April 16th at 7 PM PST. 

The full list of nominations and some commentary after the jump...

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Animated Feature - what will be nominated?

by Nathaniel R

Studio Ghibli's "Earwig and the Witch"

We really do not approve of the Academy's new shyness in telling the public which films are competing for the specialty categories. They didn't announce the animated feature eligibiility until TODAY. But here are the 27 features competing for Best Animated Feature, though the Academy has not made them official. We've helpfully divided them into categories for you after the jump...

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Oscar Chart Updates: Animated & Documentary Feature

by Nathaniel R

The Oscar charts overhaul is upon us. Let's discuss each category. First up a two-fer, Animated Feature and Documentary Feature. In both instances we don't have full eligibility lists yet but we know some of the titles that have qualified or will qualify.

ANIMATED FEATURE
We currently know of 15 features that are eligible or that plan to be. Since the threshold is only 16 films to create a full five-wide nominee field, we've decided to change our previous three-only prediction. (We'd love those odds if we were animated producers. It's so crazy easy to get nominated, statistically speaking, unlike other categories where hundreds of competitors vie for 5 slots. As we've said multiple times if the same percentage rules applied to Best Picture each year we'd have like 80-90 Best Picture nominees each year. Teehee.)

The contest is shaping up to be a battle royale between Pixar's Christmas entry Soul and the wondrously individualistic Cartoon Saloon's Wolfwalkers...

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