41st Annie Award Nominations

Tim here, with a quick bit of news: the International Animated Film Society has announced the nominees for the 41st Annie Awards. Unsurprisingly, it's heavily tilted towards big studio fare, with Despicable Me 2 dominating the list with eleven nominations, Monsters University and Frozen with ten nominations apiece, and The Croods just a breath behind with nine.

In the short categories (Best Animated Special Production, Best Animated Short), three of the films on the Oscar bake-off list made the Annies' cut: British TV special "Room on the Broom", the Canadian "Gloria Victoria", and Disney's tech-heavy new Mickey short, "Get a Horse!"

The full list of nominees is here. For now, I'll leave you with the nominations for Voice Acting, entirely men aside from Wiig. (The corresponding TV category is 100% male)

• Paul Giamatti as the voice of Chet - Turbo  
• Terry Crews as the voice of Earl – Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2  
• Kristen Wiig as the voice of Lucy – Despicable Me 2
• Steve Carell as the voice of Gru – Despicable Me 2  
• Pierre Coffin as the voice of Minions - Despicable Me 2
• Billy Crystal as the voice of Mike – Monsters University 
• Josh Gad as the voice of Olaf - Frozen

And the seven films in contention for Best Animated Feature:

• The Croods
• Despicable Me 2
• Ernest & Celestine
• Frozen
• A Letter to Momo
• Monsters University
• The Wind Rises

We can probably expect Oscar's list to consist of some combination of four or five of these.

Comments

[Conrado]

no comments? Well, I haven't seen most of the nominees, but I'm sad only Josh Gad got nominated for 'Frozen'. He made Olaf a really good character, so he deserves it, but I think Kristen Bell is just delightful and sooo funny in the movie

[Volvagia]

Turbo, Monsters University, The Minions and Terry Alan Crews are in this category? Really? Let's see: Star bleeping, phoned in, more about slapstick than V/O and rewarding a company for being either cheap or lazy or both. Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel should probably BOTH be there, as should someone from the Madoka movie and probably the only one who actually did a GOOD V/O performance on Monsters U, Joel Murray. (Everyone else was far too stock (yes, up to and including Billy Crystal) for any of the performances to MEAN ANYTHING.)

[PJ]

Satellite awards have eight nominees and it looks a lot like this one, except they do not find a place for momo and minions, but they included Meatballs 2, Turbo and Epic (I was like, really? This three are not worse than Despicable 2 but they are certainly not better as well. I don't think all four of them deserved a nomination but these three over Despicable 2 is so weird). Luckily neither Annie or Satellite nominated Planes or I will faint.

[Robert G]

Interesting. They really didn't go much for The Wind Rises, did they? Best Feature aside, it only got in for character animation and writing. They didn't even go for Miyazaki for director on his last film.

Let's be frank. The last time Disney distributed a Miyazaki film that was eligible against a Disney film (Ponyo), Disney intentionally tanked the Miyazaki campaign to get their own film in (The Princess and the Frog). Let's look at the nominations: Frozen is up for all of the awards; The Wind Rises is up for three of the awards. Coincidence?

Stack that with how Disney sat on The Secret World of Arrietty so long that it was no long eligible for the Oscars at all (!) and I suggest sabotage of Studio Ghibli features by Disney. Why campaign for someone else's films when you can earn money off of them and get your own films in the record books?

Ernest & Celestine picked up many more nominations that The Wind Rises. It was nominated for feature, director, character animation, writing, editing, and production design. That could be a sign of good things for Ernest & Celestine.