As reported yesterday on CB Biz, 18 films have qualified as eligible to be nominated for Best Animated Film at the 2011 Academy Awards. Here’s a run down of the titles – linked to their trailers on Cartoon Brew and to reader talkback posts (for those that opened in wide in the US). Which do you think will be nominated? Which one has the best chance of winning?

Rango – (talkback)
Kung Fu Panda 2 – (talkback)
Puss in Boots – (talkback)
Rio – (talkback)
Cars 2 – (talkback)
Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil – (talkback)
Gnomeo & Juliet – (talkback)
Mars Needs Moms – (talkback)
Winnie the Pooh – (talkback)
The Smurfs – (talkback)
The Adventures of Tintin
Arthur Christmas
Happy Feet Two
Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
Alois Nebel
A Cat in Paris
Chico & Rita
Wrinkles

The Academy Awards nominations will be announced live on Tuesday, January 24, 2012, at 8:30am Eastern/5:30am Pacific. The Academy Awards will be presented on ABC, Sunday February 26, 2012.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today several changes to the Oscar nomination process, with modifications to certain category rules.

For Best Animated Feature, the rules were tweaked as follows (my analysis in parentheses):

1. The need for the Board to vote to “activate” the category each year was eliminated, though a minimum number of eligible releases – eight – is still required for a competitive category (in other words, if I understand this correctly, the Animated Feature category is now permanent with no need for the Board to vote on its existence year after year.)
2. If there are eight-to-twelve features that year “two or three of them may be nominated” (previously, a minimum of 3 films would be nominated. This new rule allows the possibility of only 2 films to run against each other – in theory a third, “lesser film”, could be dropped).
3. If 13 to 15 films qualify, a maximum of four films can be nominated (this is a good new tweak, allowing for more than three films to be nominated if less than 16 animated features are released).
4. If 16 animated features are released and qualify, a maximum of five may be nominated (the tweak here allows the committee to nominate less than five films, if they so decide).

The optimist in me feels that these new tweaks won’t change the potential nominees much. To sum up: If 8-12 films qualify, three will be nominated. If 13-15 films qualify, four will be nominated. And if over 16 films qualify, five will be nominated. Read more about the new rule changes in the Academy press release here.

Last July we posted the amended Oscar rules that stated motion capture would no longer be eligible for the best animated feature Oscar. The rule changes pose a challenge for Steven Spielberg who may want his upcoming film The Adventures of Tintin to be considered for an animation Oscar. In an op-ed piece in last weekend’s LA Times, Steven Paul Leiva, the animation producer of Space Jam, argued that motion capture doesn’t qualify as animation and suggested the Academy should disqualify Tintin.

As much as I personally dislike the aesthetic effects of motion capture films, I feel that both the Academy and Leiva are dead wrong on the matter. However ugly and unappealing a Robert Zemeckis film or the upcoming Tintin might be, they are still animation in my book, as is Happy Feet and even James Cameron’s Avatar.

In motion capture, more often than not there is an animator behind the scenes building and evolving those performances. The argument, therefore, becomes a mechanical question of how much of the performance was created with recorded movement and how much by an animator. Lest we forget that the exact same question could also be posed for Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which had heavy rotoscoping on some of its human characters. The Disney studio’s later animated features like Alice in Wonderland and Sleeping Beauty were almost entirely filmed in live-action before being animated too, with often heavy reliance on rotoscoping for the final movement.

The more somebody attempts to label animation with inflexible definitions, the more prone that person becomes to making ridiculously misinformed statements such as the ones Leiva makes throughout his op-ed. For example, he argues that “film animation is not a fine or graphic art but is, rather, a performance art.” I could spend the next month posting links to abstract animated films, music videos and features like Yellow Submarine that are more graphic art oriented than performance based, but for the sake of ease, let’s just post the most obvious example that puts Leiva’s opinion to rest—a segment from Disney’s Fantasia:

The reason the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences changed their rules is understandable: they’re scared. They’re not ready to admit yet that in the next decade, feature film animation and live-action will become near indistinguishable. The kneejerk response is to throw up abitrary fences and proclaim, “This is animation” and “This isn’t animation.” Unfortunately, animation today can’t be compartmentalized. It incorporates CGI, visual effects, Machinima, After Effects puppetry and an ever-increasing variety of new techniques. The Academy will be forced into making more uncomfortable rule changes until they acknowledge the reality of animation’s evolution in the 21st century.

The traditionalists like Leiva come at it from a slightly different angle. Their position is to preserve the art of animation as if it were a dying and stagnant relic. They’ll pull out their dated “illusion of life” definitions as if Disney invented animation and made the rules for what can and and can’t be considered animation. In reality, what Leiva wants to protect is a specific brand of animated filmmaking rooted in classic conventions. Of course, take a look around and you’ll find that style of animation is still the status quo throughout the industry.

The silver lining in this whole debate is that while the Academy and the Leivas of the world rush to define animation and place labels on it, the art form will continue to evolve as it always has, in imaginative forms far beyond anybody’s wildest imagination.

The winners of this years Academy Awards were announced tonight in Hollywood.

Toy Story 3 won for Best Animated Feature (Director Lee Unkrich, above).

Toy Story 3 also won Best Song, “We Belong Together” by Randy Newman.

Best Animated Short went to The Lost Thing by Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan.

Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland won for both Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design.

A complete list of all nominees and winners is posted here.

(Pictured below, in size place, 24-hours before winning the Oscar, The Lost Thing’s director Shaun Tan, Brewmaster Jerry Beck and The Lost Thing’s key animator Leo Baker.)

The Oscar nominations were announced this morning.

Nominated for BEST ANIMATED FEATURE were:

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON – Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders
THE ILLUSIONIST – Sylvain Chomet
TOY STORY 3 – Lee Unkrich

Also: TOY STORY 3 was also nominated for BEST PICTURE, BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY, SOUND EDITING – and the song “We Belong Together” was nominated for BEST MUSIC (Original Song).

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON was also nominated for Best Music (Original Score).

TANGLED nabbed one nomination: for Best Music (Original Song), “I See The Light”.

And it’s worth noting Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland copped three nominations (Art Direction, Costume Design and Sound Editing) and Tron: Legacy got a nod for Sound editing.

Nominated for BEST ANIMATED SHORT are:

Day & Night Director: Teddy Newton. United States.
Let’s Pollute Director: Geefwee Boedoe. United States.
Madagascar, A Journey Diary Director: Bastien Dubois. France.
The Gruffalo Directors: Jakob Schuh, Max Lang. Great Britain.
The Lost Thing Directors: Andrew Ruhemann, Shaun Tan. Australia.

A complete list of nominees in all categories is posted here.

The filmmakers nominated for Best Animated Short will appear in person for Q&A at Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Samuel Goldwyn Theatre, on Tuesday February 22nd at 7:30pm – For more information check the Academy’s Oscar Event website.

The directors nominated for Best Animated Feature will appear in person for Q&A with Tom Sito on at Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Samuel Goldwyn Theatre, on Thursday Februry 24th at 7:30pm – For more information check the Academy’s website.

The Academy Awards will be presented on Sunday February 27th at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced this morning the shortlist of ten animated shorts for the 2010 Best Animated Short category. Members of the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch will now vote one more time to narrow it down to five nominees. The final vote, which determines the winner, is open to all Academy members provided that they have watched every nominated short.

We published the list of 33 qualifying shorts a few weeks ago on Cartoon Brew. The ten shorts that were voted to move forward are below. Did your favorites make the cut?

Coyote Falls
Director: Matthew O’Callaghan
United States, 2010, 3 min
Link to filmmaker website

Day & Night
Director: Teddy Newton
United States, 2010, 6 min
Link to filmmaker website

Read the rest of this entry »

The following thirty-three films have fulfilled the qualifications necessary to be considered in the category of Best Animated Short for 2010 Academy Awards. Members of the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will vote on a shortlist of ten films from this list. A second round of voting, also restricted to members of the Short Films and Feature Animation branches, will narrow it down to the five nominees for Best Animated Short Film Oscar. The final vote, which determines the winner, is open to all Academy members provided that they have watched every nominated short. It’s a wide open field this year with plenty of newcomers; only three filmmakers among the thirty-three contenders have ever been nominated for an Oscar (Bill Plympton, Tomasz Bagiński and Don Hertzfeldt).

A Family Portrait
Director: Joseph Pierce
Great Britain, 2010, 4 min
Link to filmmaker website

Angry Man (Sinna Mann)
Director: Anita Killi
Norway, 2009, 20 min
Link to filmmaker website

Animated History of Poland
Director: Tomasz Bagiński
Poland, 2010, 8 min
Link to filmmaker website

Barking Island (Chienne D’Histoire)
Director: Serge Avédikian
France, 2010, 15 min
Link to filmmaker website

Coyote Falls
Director: Matthew O’Callaghan
United States, 2010, 3 min
Link to filmmaker website

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences announced the animated features that have been accepted for consideration in the Animated Feature category of the Academy Awards. (We’ve posted the Academy’s press release in our CB Biz section.)

Fifteen features qualified:
* “Alpha and Omega”
* “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore”
* “Despicable Me”
* “The Dreams of Jinsha”
* “How to Train Your Dragon”
* “Idiots and Angels”
* “The Illusionist”
* “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole”
* “Megamind”
* “My Dog Tulip”
* “Shrek Forever After”
* “Summer Wars”
* “Tangled”
* “Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue”
* “Toy Story 3”

Under Academy rules, “in any year when 8 to 15 animated features are released in Los Angeles County, a maximum of 3 motion pictures may be nominated.” Had one more feature qualified, the number of nominees would have expanded to five features.

The biggest losers in this scenario are the indies like Bill Plympton’s Idiots and Angels, Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist and Paul and Sandra Fierlinger’s My Dog Tulip, as well as the sleeper anime hit, Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars. A field of five nominees would virtually guarantee one or two of them a nomination, but they face an uphill battle now. It’s not impossible though. In 2003, Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville scored a nomination in a field of three, and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis did the same thing in 2007. They’ll have to claw their way to the top against a crowded field of big studio contenders like Toy Story 3, How to Train Your Dragon, Despicable Me, and Tangled.