Monday 3 February 2014

Frozen Wins Big at the Annie Awards


Disney's hot streak with Frozen is continuing into awards season now. The icy musical, which has now made $864 million worldwide (making it the third highest-grossing film of 2013), had a strong showing at the 41st Annie Awards (animation's self-titled "highest honour") a couple of nights ago, taking home, amongst other awards, Best Animated Feature! Check out our full breakdown of the results after the jump.

Frozen beat out A Letter to Momo, Monsters University, and its fellow Oscar contenders: Despicable Me 2, Ernest & Celestine, The Croods and The Wind Rises, to take home the top honour of the night. Directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee also took home the award for Outstanding Direction of an Animated Feature, while Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Robert Lopez and Christophe Beck took home the Music in an Animated Feature award. The film also won for production design (Michael Giaimo, Lisa Keene and David Womersley) and voice acting (Josh Gad as Olaf).


Walt Disney Animation Studios continued their strong showing in the Best Animated Short Subject category, with the subversive Mickey Mouse short Get a Horse! winning. Meanwhile, Best Animated Special Production went to our friends at Moonbot, for their fantastic Chipotle ad, The Scarecrow (check out our interview with the short's directors here). Futurama and Adventure Time were among the TV winners of the night.

Pixar won 5 awards in total: 3 for Toy Story of TERROR!, 2 for Monsters U.

Although it was largely WDAS' night, sibling studio Pixar weren't without recognition too. Angus MacLane took home a directing gong for TV special Toy Story of TERROR! Other awards were taken home for Character Animation (Kureha Yokoo, Toy Story of TERROR!), and storyboarding, in both a TV production (Daniel Chong, Toy Story of TERROR) and a feature (Dean Kelly, Monsters University), as well as for editing (Greg Snyder, Gregory Amundson and Steve Bloom, Monsters University).

DreamWorks' The Croods got some well-deserved love in the animation and design categories too, taking home awards for Animated Effects (Jeff Budsberg, Andre Le Blanc, Louis Flores and Jason Mayer), Character Animation (Jakob Jensen) and Character Design (Carter Goodrich, Takao Noguchi and Shane Prigmore).


Shockingly, there wasn't a lot of love for Hayao Miyazaki's possibly final film, The Wind Rises, which took home only one award (Writing, for Miyazaki himself). The film's chances of upsetting Frozen at the Oscars are seemingly ever slimmer.

Overall, not particularly shocking results. But the right films, in general, seem to have got some love; Disney's Frozen definitely seems to be the Oscar frontrunner. For the full list of winners, see here.

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