Monday, February 12, 2007

Cars Cops Annie

For those not riveted to the Grammies, another awards ceremony was going on slightly to the north. In Glendale:

Pixar's Cars was named best animated feature at the 34th annual Annie Awards, handed out Sunday at the Alex Theater in Glendale, California.

But ASIFA-Hollywood presented Flushed Away, from DreamWorks Animation and Aardman Animations, with more trophies than any other film.

Flushed earned honors in five categories: Scott Cegielski took the prize for animated effects; Gabe Hordos, feature character animation; Pierre-Olivier Vincent, feature production design; Ian McKellen, feature voice acting for the character of Toad; and Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, Christopher Lloyd, Joe Keenan and Will Davies, feature writing. In addition, Flushed Away the Game, from D3 Publisher of America, was named best animated video game.

Our congratulations to all the winners, as well as the nominees. (More coverage here, from the East Coast...)

3 comments:

Kevin Koch said...

It was, as usual, an excellent evening. A few of the notable parts for me:

Cars won best picture and best music, but that was all. The two DreamWorks' films, despite neither one being given an Oscar nod, took a total of 8 Annies. The Oscar nominees Happy Feet and Monster House didn't have a single Annie between them.

The Avatar fans were by far the most vocal. They practically brought down the roof in support of their nominees and winners.

Host Tom Kenny did another great job, though he seemed blissfully unaware that animation writers are covered by two different unions (839 and the WGA, depending on the show). He made an odd joke about writers being the only nonunion workers in animation. Huh?

The guy accepting for Yu Jae Myung in Character Animation in a TV Production had the best speech of the night -- he had a "scroll puppet" of the winner (who was in Korea), with a string actuated mouth. Very appropriate for an animated awards ceremony.

The old warning about not plugging too many appliances into a cheap extension cord is for real! One of those extension cords caused a fire that knocked out the video on the stage for a short time. Fortunately, we didn't have to run screaming out of the building, and the evening went on with hardly a hitch.

The George Bush impersonator was amazingly dead on, and hilarious. Almost as funny as the real guy.

The convienence of walking to the tent behind the Alex for the after dinner was great, but the food wasn't as good as at the resturants the last couple of years.

Overall an excellent evening. Go here for photos:

http://www.asifa-hollywood.org/blogger.html

David Germain said...

The Oscar nominees Happy Feet and Monster House didn't have a single Annie between them.

That makes me happy.

Anonymous said...

"Cars" won best picture??!?

There goes my respect for thar award...

Rufus.

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