The Annie Awards, often seen as the animated equivalent of the Academy Award, is due to have its 41st ceremony on February 1, 2014. With that deadline coming soon, the full list of nominees have been released today. You can find them here:
http://annieawards.org/nominees/
But as of now, I just want to look at my two favorite categories: “Best Animated Feature” and “Outstanding Achievement, Voice Acting in an Animated Feature Production”.
For the first category, seven films have been nominated:
A Letter to Momo – GKIDS
Despicable Me 2 – Universal Pictures
Ernest & Celestine – GKIDS
Frozen – Walt Disney Animation Studios
Monsters University – Pixar Animation Studios
The Croods – DreamWorks Animation
The Wind Rises – The Walt Disney Studios
In a year when animation has not been outstanding, I have no problem with any of the nominations. But I feel that the clear winner will be “Frozen” and I’ll be quite surprised if it isn’t.
For the other category, there are also seven nominations:
Paul Giamatti as the voice of Chet – Turbo – DreamWorks Animation
Terry Crews as the voice of Earl – Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2 – Sony Pictures Animation
Kristen Wiig as the voice of Lucy – Despicable Me 2 – Universal Pictures
Steve Carell as the voice of Gru – Despicable Me 2 – Universal Pictures
Pierre Coffin as the voice of Minions – Despicable Me 2 – Universal Pictures
Billy Crystal as the voice of Mike – Monsters University – Pixar Animation Studios
Josh Gad as the voice of Olaf – Frozen – Walt Disney Animation Studios
I agree with all of the nominations here, except for Billy Crystal as I don’t feel that he did an excellent job worthy of an award. I also would rather have Bill Hader as Guy Gagné be nominated for “Turbo” rather than Paul Giamatti as Chet; although Paul Giamatti did a surprisingly good job too! And I haven’t seen “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2” yet nor heard the character much to have an opinion regarding Terry Crews’ voice acting.
With that said, I feel that Josh Gad as Olaf from “Frozen” deserves the award. He is an excellent voice actor and made a horrible film (“Ice Age: Continental Drift”) somewhat bearable to watch. But I have my doubts as to whether he WILL win. If I had to predict who WILL win, I have a feeling that someone from “Despicable Me 2” will take home the award, though I can’t say whom.
What do you all think? Who do you think should/will win in these categories? What about the other categories? Leave your answers in the comments below! Thanks!
The Animation Commendation 
I think Kristen Wiig will probably win. I am disappointed ‘Frozen’ didn´t get more voice acting nominations. I haven’t seen most of the films, but I thought Kristen Bell was great as Anna, she should’ve gotten in at least over Billy Crystal.
Josh Gad would also be my choice for the win, I was afraid Olaf was going to be a horrible character and he ended up being really funny and endearing.
I haven’t seen “Frozen” yet, but from what I’ve heard in the trailer and stuff, Kristen Bell does a very good job, but I think she’s one notch behind Josh Gad.
I am not sure…Frozen is the obvious choice, due to the virtue of being the only truly good movie this year, but there is also “The Wind rises” which is apparently Miyazaki’s last movie. Movies like this tend to win awards to give the creator his last honours.
I agree that they will most likely give the voice actor award to Despicable me…if for no other reason than to make sure that Frozen doesn’t get all the awards. They like to spread them out a little bit. Never mind that Disney is so strong this year that they are most likely glad for every award they can give someone else.
I guess since I’m not really a Japanese animation fan I’m not really keeping an eye out for the impending challenge that is “The Wind Rises”.
You and I both read the Oscar predictions on Rotoscopers. While Frozen is smearing the american animated films, they might give it to Wind Rises because it is Miyazaki`s final film (though I never thought much of Ghibli films). I don’t even think it should be nominated since it is not even released in most of the world until 2014. Don`t care about the vice acting nominations, but they`ll probably give it to DM2 actors, since it is so called funny. Need to watch that film for an article.
Actually, I didn’t…but I now searched for the site.
I highly recommend Rotoscopers, it’s an amazing site with great animation-addicts and writers. I also have a crush on Morgan Stradling (one of the creators), so I may be biased in my recommending of the site 😉 .
Oh my….. I never knew you pre-wrote your articles weeks before publishing too.
Isn’t everyone doing this? It is one of the nicest feature here at wordpress, being able to schedule the articles.
I only do that for my live-action blog and not that often.
I actually wrote this post before reading the Rotoscopers’ one, lol!
Wow. I’ve only seen one of these films!!! That’s very remiss of me. I’ll have to catch The Croods on DVD.
I think it’s great to see Broadway actors like Josh Gad and Idina Menzel getting into animated filmmaking, even without singing roles. I’ve hoped for a while that they would see “offstage” success.
Yes it is a great thing indeed!
I finally saw Epic by the way. I had extremely low expectations as I sat to watch it. It was entertaining, but not one I have to see again.
Yeah, I had extremely low expectations too so that helped a lot!