News media stories about the Oscars are cropping up all over and all of them are parroting the same factoid: Up is only the second time since the inception of the award that the Academy has nominated an animated film for Best Picture. (The first time was Beauty and the Beast in 1991.) What they should be writing is that today is a milestone day because two animated films were nominated for an Oscar: Up and Avatar.

There is little doubt in the minds of both Brewmasters, Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi, that Avatar will eventually be recognized as an animated feature as more and more films are created using the constantly evolving performance capture animation technique. Within the industry, most already recognize the film as heavily animated, from top feature film animators who wonder why Avatar’s animators are receiving so little credit for their work on the film to animation union rep Steve Hulett who stated that if, “Avatar isn’t halfway to three-quarters animation, I will eat my computer.” Most importantly, had this film been submitted to the Academy for consideration in the animated feature category, it would have qualified under the Academy’s own rules.

While James Cameron’s publicity machine may be unwilling to acknowledge the extent of animation used in creating Avatar, let us be the first to congratulate Mr. Cameron on his nomination for his groundbreaking piece of animation.

After nine weeks in wide release, Disney’s Princess and the Frog limped across the $100 million mark last weekend. It generated $757,000 at the North American box office for a grand total that now stands at $100,309,000. Somehow I have the feeling there won’t be a lot of people uncorking the champagne in Burbank today.

And most of you are asking “Who cares?”

The original Hoodwinked had art direction and character design that were - let’s face it - piss poor, but I enjoyed the film nonetheless. It had a funny, clever script with good performances — and took me (and a whole lot of other people) by surprise, grossing $51 million in January 2006.

The Weinstein Company has pulled the sequel, Hoodwinked Too: Hood vs. Evil, off its release schedule for the time being. It was first set for January 15th 2010, then pushed back to February 12th, and now… who knows? According to his blog, Hoodwinked’s creator himself, Cory Edwards, has no idea when the film will be released. But that hasn’t stopped Weinstein’s pre-existing deal with Burger King to offer toys from the sequel with its Kids Meals this month. Better scoop them up now, they may become quite a collectible.

The Illusionist, the long-awaited follow-up feature from Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville), will debut next month at the Berlin International Film Festival. This article from Scotland’s The Herald confirms that the hand-drawn film is Scotland’s most expensive film production ever, with a budget “significantly north of £10 million.” In US dollars, that works out to a modest $16 million, which would be considered a bargain by most studios. According to the article, the film was made primarily in Edinburgh at ­Chomet’s Django Films, with further work done by ink.digital in Dundee, Scotland and another studio in Paris. Personally, I’ve heard that to get the film done, they farmed out large parts to service studios, including around forty minutes of assistant animation and clean-up to Sunwoo in South Korea.

To take advantage of Scottish film incentives, Chomet transposed the film’s action from Paris to Edinburgh and the Western Isles, which according to one person interviewed by The Herald, isn’t necessarily a bad thing:

Film-maker and critic Mark ­Cousins, who helped Chomet set up his Edinburgh studio, has seen several extracts of the film. “We should be very excited about The Illusionist,” he said. “Even though it wasn’t originally set in Scotland, the end result really is quite Scottish. It has a real feel of the marmalade and bracken colour of Mull in the autumn. The screenplay was one of the best that I’ve seen. This could be a ­classic of Scottish cinema.”

(Thanks, Martin Gornall and Florian Satzinger)

In 2004, CG animation studio Threshold Entertainment and Motion Picture Magic, a product placement company in Encino, teamed up to produce a food version of Toy Story titled Foodfight. Announced with great fanfare, Foodfight would team 80 name-brand products and their associated characters, including Mr. Clean, Cap’n Crunch, Charlie the Tuna, the Engergizer Bunny and the Brawny paper towel man, in an adventure set in a supermarket city - and a voice cast including Charlie Sheen, Eva Longoria, Chris Kattan and Christopher Lloyd. The last time we reported any news on the film was in 2007, when Lionsgate supposedly picked up the film for release.

I’d completely forgotten about the project until Brew reader Kurtis Findlay sent me this pic of merchandising (photo above) he found while he was Christmas shopping. Kurtis says, “I have to say that the characters look far better in 2D than they do in 3D! Do you think the manufacturer of this product got sick of all of them sitting in their warehouse and just released them without the movie tie-in?” Probably. And one look at the characters tells me this film might have better luck remaining unseen and on the shelf.

“It’s not even a contest,” was the response an unnamed Disney exec gave the NY Times when asked to comment on Fantastic Mr. Fox’s Oscar chances against Up. Despite the swagger that some Disney folks apparently have, the Times warns that Disney and Pixar shouldn’t break out the bubbly just yet:

In a mid-December surprise, both the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association named “Fantastic Mr. Fox” the best animated movie of 2009. Similar awards from five other critics’ groups followed.

Fantastic Mr. Fox and Up are both nominated for this weekend’s Golden Globe Award, along with Coraline, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The Princess and the Frog. Since initiating a Best Animated Feature Film category in 2007, the Golden Globes have given the award to Pixar every year (Cars, Ratatouille, WALL•E). We’ll find out in a few days whether Pixar can make it four-in-a-row at the Globes.

The trailer for an upcoming German CG feature, Die Konferenz der Tiere, co-directed by Reinhard Klooss and Holger Tappe at Constantin Film:

It’s based on a 1949 children’s book by Erich Kästner that took an Animal Farm-esque approach to Germany’s East-West conflict. The book was previously adapted into an animated feature in 1969. A clip from that earlier film can be viewed on YouTube. Which version would you rather watch?

Hot of the heels of the recent spate stop-motion features - Fantastic Mr. Fox, Coraline, Mary and Max, $9.99 and A Town Called Panic - comes word of production of even more! A new UK feature called Jackboots on Whitehall is an epic World War Two satire, animated with what look like “Ken” dolls. Ewan McGregor, Tom Wilkinson and Alan Cumming are among the voice cast. Written and directed by newcomers Edward and Rory McHenry, the film is scheduled for a release later this year. Twitch Film has posted a dozen stills which display the scope of the production. For more information, join the film’s Facebook page here.

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Then there is a Polish film about Chopin on a flying piano! The Flying Machine (aka Project Chopin) seems to be a combo of CG and stop motion, and of course it’s in 3D! Animators Martin Clapp, Marek Skrobecki and Adam Wyrwas (of Susie Templeton’s Peter and The Wolf, 2006) are teaming with famed Chinese composer/pianist Lang Lang to create this feature. Here’s a behind-the-scenes promo: