I’ll get to the Brad Bird thing is a sec…
The Annie Awards (for animation) recently happened, with the same hushed non-fanfare that sadly occurs every year because regular people don’t respect animation for some reason (grrrr). The winners can be found here, for those who are interested.
Some might consider this year’s Annie’s a horrifying upset, as How To Train Your Dragon swept the motherfucking floor with Toy Story 3, with Dragon taking home trophies for Animated Effects, Character Animation, Character Design, Directing, Music, Production Design, Storyboarding, Voice Acting, Writing, and…
Best Feature.
I don’t consider this an upset, as I thought Dragon was better than Toy Story 3. But Dragon‘s wins seem to be tainted in some eyes, because Disney/Pixar boycotted this years ceremony. See, two years ago Kung Fu Panda beat WALL-E in a similar landslide. This caused a lot of people to call bullshit on the Annie’s balloting process. Unlike the Motion Picture Academy, the ASIFA-Hollywood is broken into three tiers of membership: General Member, Student Member, and Patron, and joining ASIFA-Hollywood is open to professionals and students and lowly fans of the artform (for a fee). So people accused Dreamworks of buying memberships and stacking the votes.
Now, obviously I have no special behind-the-scenes knowledge of these events and what actually happened. Maybe Dreamworks did pull a fast one. You know Harvey Weinstein would be doing that kind of shit if it were possible at the Oscars. But three things inherently bother me about all this.
1) The Annie’s changed their rules after the Panda “scandal” and now certain categories (like Best Feature) can only be voted on by those with professional status.
2) Why is it such a foregone conclusion that WALL-E is better than Kung Fu Panda? That WALL-E losing to Panda means a conspiracy has taken place? I guess I’m just a complete philistine moron, because I liked Panda more than WALL-E. I also hate hearing how WALL-E going on to win the Oscar somehow means anything. Like the Oscars aren’t a joke too.
3) In between these “bullshit” Dreamworks wins, both Up and Ratatouille won Best Feature. Also, Cars “unfairly” lost to Over the Hedge. Now, Over the Hedge is not a great film. But you know what else isn’t a great film? Fucking Cars. Seems to me Disney/Pixar feels like Pixar needs to win every time they make a movie. Well, this year Pixar’s brilliant short Day & Night toke home the Annie for Best Short, very deservedly. If you ask me, Pixar gets their due when they should.
Sour grapes much Disney/Pixar? Come on, I expect better from you Pixar. You’re SOOOOO much better than Dreamworks, generally/historically speaking.
Okay. Sorry. Rant over. Now…
Brad Bird.
Brad Bird (awesomest dude ever) received the prestigious Winsor McCay Award (lifetime achievement), shared with Matt Groening and the wildly less famous animation supervisor Eric Goldberg. After a nice little retrospective on Bird’s career, Bird gives a stilted speech in which he makes a horrible announcement regarding the future of his career! For those who want to get right to the bad news, skip ahead to the 4-minute mark.
20 comments
I thought Dragon was well done, but it was pretty standard, and painfully predectiable. We see people ripping on Avatar for being so cliche, Dragon was worse. Toy Story 3 was much better IMO… but I agree, these awards are meaningless.
Still don’t get the Cars hate. It’s a good movie. Get over it.
And that “announcement” is classic.
Despite what my aggressive use of the word “fucking” in there would imply, I don’t actually have anything against CARS. It was simply made for a much younger audience than most of the Pixar films. Nothing wrong with that. Though I don’t think I have anything to “get over” either way.
I think “get over it” is more of my reaction to the “Cars Sucks” bandwagon, which you are clearly NOT on, so please ignore my knee-jerk reaction.
I think alot of the car dislike comes from them, being Cars… the plot is solid, and the message is good. People have a hard time in general relaiting to something that isn’t bipedal in nature.
I thought it was because people jumped to the “it’s the NASCAR movie” conclusion, which it clearly is not. If anything, it’s about leaving the loud NASCAR bullshit behind and slowing down a bit. Well, that and the fact that it has Larry The Cable Douche in it, although he ends up turning in a really great performance (dammit).
Cars was a rip off of Doc Hollywood, which is one of several reasons that made it bad, but can we all agree that Over the Hedge is a classic for the Hammy slo-mo sequence alone!… anybody?
Wow, Joshua, you managed a lengthy rant on a topic you didn’t even bother to research. Kudos to adding more useless blather to this site. Next time you decide to comment on something, do five minutes of research on the background. Maybe your opinion would matter more if it were informed.
Pixar and Disney are sour grapes here, but they’re protesting the way the Annies are voted on. Dreamworks has a massive advantage and so, not surprisingly, their films are beating Pixars most years in every category. For the record, Cars sucked but Kung Fu Panda was massively overrated. I did like Dragon better than TS3, but TS3 is a hell of lot more critically acclaimed and popular than Dragon. You do the math.
What detail is it I got wrong, JoelCE? As I in fact mentioned the Annie’s voting process.
How to Train Your Dragon was very much like “The Iron Giant” and basically every “Boy and his dog” media out there. Boy doesn’t fit in….. boy finds animal… boy and animal relate… yada yada yada… I still do like it though, it is very cute, but I think Toy Story 3 was a much better film overall, and one that will be remembered years from now.
There’s no maybe about it. You ARE a complete philistine moron… but we forgive you. Love Brad Bird. That’s weird.
To forgive is divine.
Dreamworks Animation requires every employee to have a membership. They have a much larger animation dept than any other studio. If your employer required you to be a voting member, it’s likely to assume you’re going to vote for your own product rather than vote for anything else. Or at least that’s the gist of Pixar/Disney’s complaint. Since the Annies are the only voting body that seems to regularly break with every critics’ group, awards group, and even box office totals on this subject, Pixar/Disney have a lot of room to complain. It’s sour grapes because you can’t prove there’s a bias, but when How to Train Your Dragon wins in every single category it was nominated for, in a year that featured quite a few good animated films, one has to wonder if Dreamworks doesn’t own the Annies outright.
I don’t like Pixar winning everything (in fact, I find it kind of boring and insulting to all the great non-American animation year after year), but when their product is simply better than the other major studio’s works year after year its not hard to see why they win everything.
But keep calling them dicks if that’s what gets you page hits.
Why didn’t you just say all that in the first place instead of being snarky?
How is Dragon standard far? Seriously, Hiccup loses a part of himself for god’s sake. When does that ever happen in a Pixar film? Dragon is wonder but people like the write of this piece seem to dig it more than TS3 for their own weird website/geek reasons. Whatever. Cars is also not a freaking rip-off of Doc Hollywood. Cars is about finding a place and community. Doc Hollywood has a similar setting but that film is more about love than family and community.
…I have faith that Mr. Bird will no doubt prevail over his captors and return to the wonderfull world of animation and if not…damn you Simon Pegg and Tom Cruise…damn yous guys, damn yyyooooouuuuu!!!!!!!
This made me like Tom Cruise.
I might be a retard, but the video actually had me going for a bit.
You aren’t alone. It had me until I watched his eyes and realized he was reading off cue cards, very intentionally. Then I knew something was up.
The man can even finds ways to be a creative genius during an acceptance speech. Truly amazing.
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