When Toons Rule Hollywood
Hosted by Patrick Warburton, this year’s Annie Awards promise a festive night, packed with industry stars, great jokes and lots of suprises.
Hosted by Patrick Warburton, this year’s Annie Awards promise a festive night, packed with industry stars, great jokes and lots of suprises.
Those of us who are weary of how many major awards shows treat animated movies and TV shows like second-class citizens have a special night to look forward to in February: Yes, we’re talking about the annual Annie Awards, which honor all the hard-working men and women who toil away all year round on animated and vfxdriven content. The 41st edition of the show, which will take place February 1 at UCLA’s Royce Hall, promises to be another exciting event, packed with top-notch toon talent and Hollywood gliteratti and, as ASIFA-Hollywood Frank Gladstone tells us, we are definitely in for a high-class show this year.
“We’re hoping to make the ceremony more direct and elegant,” says Gladstone, an industry veteran who has been the president of ASIFAHollywood since early 2011. “We are very happy to have a great host—Patrick Warburton—who had been wanting to do this for years, but his schedule never allowed him to do it before, but we managed to have him commit to us early.”
Among this year’s special highlights are the three juried Winsor McCay awards, which will be handed out to Steven Spielberg, Katsuhiro Otomo and Phil Tippett for their career contributions to the art of animation; the June Foray Award, which will go to Alice Davis for her significant, charitable commitments; and the Certificate of Merit which goes to I Know That Voice, the acclaimed documentary about our fave voice-over artists, directed by Lawrence Shapiro and produced by Shapiro, Tommy Reid and John DiMaggio.
Gladstone says improvements were made this year to the online voting process, so that members could skip entries if they didn’t feel like they were qualified to pick a winner in a certain category. He also points out that over a thousand awards submissions were made in 2013, which is a very healthy number. He adds, “As usual, we were lobbied to add new cateogires, but we feel that if we add any more awards, then we will have to expand the event into two separate ceremonies, which is what they do for the Academy Awards. That will mean more infrastructure and planning, and we’re on the cusp of doing that. I think that is something that we have to do eventually.”
Of course, awards watchers will be keeping an eye on who will be picking up the big prizes. One of the best things about the Annies is that more of our favorite movies and TV shows are able to share the glory. There is usually a nice balance of how the awards are spread out between the indies and the big studio titles. For example, in the feature race, CG heavyweights such as Disney’s Frozen, DreamWorks’ The Croods, Universal/ Illumination’s Despicable Me 2 and Pixar’s Monsters University will be competing with hand-drawn favorites GKIDS’ Ernest and Celestine and A Letter to Momo and Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises. We’ll be lucky if we see all seven titles showing up in the Oscar race. (The Hollywood Foreign Press only picked three studio titles for the Golden Globe Animated Feature category.)
The TV categories also provide a wide range of contenders: The Best Animated TV series nominees are Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, Warner Bros.’ Beware the Batman, Disney TV’s Gravity Falls, Nickelodeon’s Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, Cartoon Network’s Regular Show, Nelvana’s Scaredy Squirrel and Warner Bros.’ Teen Titans Go!, while the General Audience TV show race features FX’s Archer, Bento Box/ Fox’s Bob’s Burgers, Disney TV’s TRON: Up- rising, Fox’s Motorcity.
The Future Is Here
As Gladstone sees it, technology is making it possible for indies to find audiences alongside the big studio franchises. “Of course, we’d like to see more independent films being done locally here in the U.S. and not just overseas,” he says. “I’d also like to see more overseas representation in our nominees, and I think we’re beginning to see more of that each year. Overall, as you look at the industry, four or five titles in the top-10 blockbusters of 2013 are animated. We are also seeing 2D represented in the independent field. You can see it as a continuum, a march towards a variety of topics and styles using new technologies.”
Of course, advancements in technology are also making it possible for ASIFA to stream an edited version of the awards show on its website, only two or three weeks after the actual ceremony. “We will take the show and edit it a little, cut down the extra long walks to the podiums, but we’ll leave all the speeches,” promises Gladstone. “Everyone can watch the show at their leisure. We’re also toying with a national broadcast … someone is always interested in doing it, but it’s a complicated process. One of these years, we’ll do it because there’s interest in the show from animation fans all over the world.”
After all the awards season hoopla settles down, it’s all about celebrating the exceptional work that is done by animation industry professionals all year long. “When the Annie Awards started all those years ago, it was the award that honors our industry, by our industry for our industry,” recalls Gladstone. “It’s really about getting to see the people in our field that we don’t get to see on a daily basis. We gather to celebrate the accomplishments that we all know are not easy to do at all. That’s why I think the Annies are important and that’s why they have grown so much.”
To learn more about this year’s Annie Awards, visit www.annieawards.org.