Saturday, February 04, 2012

The Annie Festivities

Now with Add On!

Many awards handed out, which may or may not presage who gets the Little Gold Man a few weeks hence.

Rango was named best animated feature ... with Jennifer Yuh Nelson earning the best direction award for Kung Fu Panda 2, which won a second Annie for production design. The Adventures of Tintin also collected a pair Annies, for music and animated effects.

The Winsor McCay award went to Borge Ring, and Walt Peregoy and Ronald Searle. Peregoy did not disappoint. He provided the evening with a salty (taped) acceptance speech.

(Art Leonardi, winner of the June Foray award, can be heard telling his life story here and here.)

Add On: Gore Verbinski weighs in about animated features and the people who make them:

“It feels like I’m being let into a secret society,” Rango director Gore Verbinski told The Hollywood Reporter at his first Annie (Animation) Awards ...

“They collaborate in such a massive way that you don’t really get in live action,” he said of the makers of animated movies. “In live action, as a director you are more of a preserved voice. In animation there are people who really put their egos aside and real collaborate toward a vision that isn’t diluted or compromised by that collaboration. It is a very specific type of person (who works in animation).” ...

16 comments:

Chris Sobieniak said...

I had fun watching it from my room with a decent connection, but I was concerned my browser would crash so I had to shut it off after some hour and 45 minutes through, but I got the gist of it (though missed out on Walt Peregoy's speech I should've listened to). When Borge Ring's moment came I had to notice one of the comments I read on Ustream called him "one ugly dude". Shamefully really but that's what you get for giving people a voice online to be read.

Michael Sporn said...

The online version was a dull show, indeed. I waited for Borge Ring's daughter to speak but found her speech interrupted by an online commercial. Same was true for Walt Peregoy. Basically, I missed them both and got to watch a lot of embarrassed winners make the routine speeches. Hopefully, next year there will be a budget for a few cutaway shots to audience members.

Anonymous said...

The show was as dull online as it is in person. Watching this debacle, one would think animators are the dullest, most unimaginative, and least creative people on earth. But then again, no one ever accused frank gladstone of being creative or knowing anything about animation.

That range won anything is truly a sign of how irrelevant the annies have become altogether.

That said, it's a pretty bad year for animation, so it's no wonder.

Anonymous said...

Is this the first time Pixar hasn't won anything?!?!?

Anonymous said...

Once I figured out I could watch a commercial 'early', the streaming went pretty well - up until I started hitting some pretty bad lag (might have been my end, who knows) that made it unwatchable.

I'm not sure what people are expecting out of the annies - it's an award show and a time for everyone to honor the people in our craft, not necessarily something made purely for entertainment purposes.

Anonymous said...

All of the links I found available to watch this made me wonder if my Hi-Speed internet connection was really hi speed. The stop and start was so bad, I found the minute by minute reports on AN to be the best way to find out that everyone I knew lost. Yay to AN. (Asifa take note: there really needs to be better people to put this together for maximum impact).

Anonymous said...

No technical problems here, I queued up the Ustream channel on my Roku box and watched straight through without interruption, though the image was a bit low-res. Really enjoyed watching the Annies from my couch on TV as if it was a regular broadcast.

Aside from a couple slow spots during the Winsor McCay features, it was anything but dull... The off-the-cuff nature was part of the fun and separates it from other awards shows. Patton Oswalt really hit his stride when he had to adlib in response to the gaffes during the second half of the broadcast.

Hopefully they keep doing the live stream every year going forward; it was cool to finally see the awards unfold as they happened.

Anonymous said...

I've been going to the Annies for 8 years now and this year was by far the most boring, unfunny, poorly executed show I've seen. The only "funny" thing about the show was seeing how badly organized the entire thing was and how many ridiculous mistakes were made. I wouldn't be surprised if this decline in quality has something to do with Frank Gladstone replacing Antran as ASIFA president. This will surely be my last Annie Awards and I don't plan on renewing my ASIFA membership either.

Anonymous said...

After 39 years at this you'd think the Annie Awards, from it's voting procedures to the award ceremony, could pull off something that isn't a blundering mess.

Anonymous said...

OH WOW... JONNY DEPP! WHAT A REVOLUTIONARY FILMMAKER! YOU MEAN YOU AND THE OTHER ACTORS SERVED AS INSPIRATION FOR THE CHARACTERS? OH WOW! YOU'RE SO INNOVATIVE! OH MY GAWD YOU'RE AWESOME! HOW DID YOU EVER COME UP WITH THAT IDEA? OH WOW! YOU'RE JUST SO COOL! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! THANK YOU, ACTORS, FOR ELEVATING OUR HUMBLE LITTLE MEDIUM WITH YOUR GENIUS! OH WOW! JONNY DEPP... YOU'RE JUST SO... JUST SO AWESOME!

Anonymous said...

I think I love Rango even more for all the rage it inspires.

el diablo said...

'I think I love Rango even more for all the rage it inspires'

I second that!!

Anonymous said...

Considering that ASIFA's yearly membership fees went up one would think they could of used that extra money to pull off a better show. From what I have seen it just bought Frank Gladstone a nice Mercedes. What was his job again at Warners and DreamWorks? I never got what he did at either of those places when I was there. Maybe next year Max Howard can help organize things with Frank.

Anonymous said...

> Is this the first time Pixar hasn't won anything?!?!?

Hardly. They didn't win anything in 2005 (didn't release anything) or 2008 (Wall-E lost, which is when they threw a temper tantrum about the voting rules.)

Anonymous said...

Lets hope Gore Verbinski doesn't get comfortable... You're just visiting right? Back to live action with you? Please?

Anonymous said...

Love how adam and dog won for short subject! amazing how one disney visdev artist with his friends after hours could make something head over heels better then a big budget feature film studio.. It was simply just on a higher level of sophistication and quality on all aspects of animation film-making.. story, animation, color, editing, design, layout.. and this was all mainly done by one artist who is half the age of the directors at the annies!!

goes to show how inadequate Disney/Lassetar is in picking director/leadership roles at the studio.. and also missing one of it's biggest director/animator/design/layout/color talents that's hiding right under it's nose..

I remember reading on this site how much hate their was coming from older employees about young "trainees" working at Disney who weren't as talented and experienced but cheaper..

..the truth is that young Disney "trainees" like Minkyu put a lot of experienced artists at Disney to shame not just in terms of one specialty of the pipeline, but how a individual can be exceptional at many levels of the pipeline..

This just proves that experience and age alone isn't always a factor in terms of quality..

it's also amazing how little press there is about it.. Especially from folks like Amid, Jerry, and Michael Sporn and even this site as well.. Critics who are such big proponents of animated short films.. yet have hardly mentioned it this year.. except for Amid mentioning how Adam's butt cheeks are not drawn..

would love to see Amid, Jerry, Sporn. Lassetar, old farts and other haters eat their words as this small film goes on to win at Berlin, Cannes, Annecy, Oscars, Hiroshima, Ottawa..etc

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