Sunday 21 October 2012

Best of the Last Ten Years A113Animation Awards Results!


A couple of months back, we announced two special, commemorative, A113Animation Awards: The Best of the Last Ten Years (2001 - 2011) Awards. We subsequently realised that that's actually 11 (whoops!), but the sentiment remains the same: to recognise and reward the best and brightest of animation over the last decade and a bit. And now we have our winner.

We announced two awards, a "Best Animated Film of the Last Ten Years" award, and a "People's Favourite Animated Film of the Last Ten Years" one. Firstly, I was deciding the official A113Animation "Best" one (although it seems you all mainly agree with me), and, from our announced shortlist of six films, we picked our winner: Toy Story 3!
  • The Incredibles (2004)
  • Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
  • WALL-E (2008)
  • Up (2009)
  • Toy Story 3 (2010)
  • How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
I intended this to be the more important award, but the overwhelming enthusiasm and participation by you, A113Animation readers, meant that the "People's Favourite" award soon overshadowed it; and it's been a heated race!


From our original longlist of 27 animated films, with the the two highest voted (WALL-E and Toy Story 3) progressing through to the final automatically, we've had a huge number of votes: over 200 in total! Subsequent rounds of voting gave us our final list of 6, not dissimilar to my own. The outcome was even more similar to my own choice, with Toy Story 3 again coming out on top!
  • Finding Nemo (2003) - 9 votes
  • WALL-E (2008) - 9 votes
  • How to Train Your Dragon (2010) - 2 votes
  • Toy Story 3 (2010) - 15 votes
  • Up (2009) - 12 votes
  • The Incredibles (2004) - 6 votes
Lee Unkrich's masterfully directed threequel, that earned Pixar their second Best Picture nomination, (only the third animated film ever to do so) truly is the best animated film in recent memory, and one of the best of all time.

It's telling also, of the quality of the Emeryville studio's output, that of the 12 films in the 2 lists, there were only 3 non-Pixar films; and in the poll, How to Train Your Dragon, a fantastic film, got the fewest votes by a large margin. Pixar are masters of storytelling and, more fundamentally, emotional resonance.

But, of our winner: funny, exciting, gorgeous, and, primarily, moving and poignant, Toy Story 3 is the film of our generation, and it seems only right that we here at A113Animation add another small accolade to the film's huge mountain of acclaim. Thank you Lee Unkrich, thank you Darla K. Anderson, thank you John Lasseter, and thank you Pixar, for bookending my childhood with such grace, and congratulations on being the best animated film of the last ten years!

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