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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Cartoon Saloon: A Dream of Irish Animation

by Cláudio Alves

In the past decade, Cartoon Saloon has managed to become one of the most important studios of western animation. It all started back in 2009 when the Belgian-French-Irish co-production The Secret of Kells premiered at the Gérardmer Film Festival. That medieval fantasy went on to conquer a surprising, though amply deserved, Academy Award nomination, as have all the studios' subsequent features – 2014's Song of the Sea, 2017's The Breadwinner, and this year's Wolfwalkers.

With that last picture upon us, it feels like an appropriate time to recall the short history of this splendid studio...

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Pt 2 - Looking at Netflix's contenders in all Oscar categories

by Juan Carlos Ojano

As explained in Part One we're looking at Netflix's deep slate this year and pinpointing how they might be competitive in each of the 23 Oscar categories (it used to be 24 categories but Sound Editing and Sound Mixing have now become one category). In part two, which follows after the jump, we're discussing the "big eight" marquee categories, plus animated feature...

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