Laying Odds on Best Screenplay

The L.A. Times profiles Oscar nominee Wall-E in the screenplay category:

... As a page of "Wall-E's" nominated screenplay dramatizes, an animated script can be a complex document, particularly when you don't have nouns and verbs to help explain a character's feelings. The beeps in "Wall-E," particularly, are not random sounds -- in fact, a look at the script shows that each beep can be translated into a specific line of dialogue. "Every sound he makes carries some meaning," says Ben Burtt, who provided Wall-E's voice design and was the film's supervising sound editor ...

Setting aside the criticism of Wall-E's second and especially third act, any animated feature screenplay has hurdles to jump over on its way to Academy gold.

First, it isn't under the Writers Guild's jurisdiction. That's a major impediment. Second, there's the inbred snobbishness about the legitimacy of animation. For many Academy members, it's a second-tier art form, particularly when Oscars are handed out,.

Lastly, any animated feature worth its weight in gold-plated statuettes isn't just created on the written page. Script is important, but storyboard work is crucial; it's where character, plot and dialogue are worked and reworked the way a baker gneads warm dough.

If you don't have talented storyboard artists on an animated feature, you don't have a film with life or snap. Because as much as writers are needed on any feature-length motion picture -- and they are needed -- writers are a smaller part of the total movie equation in the animated universe.

Sitting here in my dull, late-night stupor, I can think of only one cartoon feature where a single individual wrote and storyboarded the entire project, front to back. The film was One Hundred and One Dalmations, and the individual was Bill Peet.