Furry Movie Award Watch: April

We are at a weird point right now; since the Ursa Majors will not be announced for another couple of months, we cannot just let 2011 slide. At the same time, 2012 is almost a quarter done, so it seems a bit stupid to keep hanging on to the past year.

There are in fact a couple of things left unsaid from 2011 that are still worth saying, so this will be the final round up of 2011 ramblings before I start plugging away at 2012.

crossie’s current best guesses

A year of records

Furry movies scored a lot firsts and records in the three categories. Obviously, in the Ursa Majors, Bitter Lake covered some new ground.

I have gone on and on about how Jennifer Yuh Nelson, director of Kung Fu Panda 2, became the top grossing woman director for a single movie, taking the record from Mamma Mia’s Phyllida Lloyd. She also became the first woman to win the Annie for Best Director and the first woman to be a movie’s sole nominee for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Marjane Sartrapi was a co-nominee for Persepolis.

Rango’s win became the first time a traditionally live action director won the award for Best Animated Feature. It is traditional for a first time nominee to be invited into the Academy branch representing the award he or she was nominated for; this is less a rule than a guideline, however, and Gore Verbinski may be allowed into the Directors’ branch rather than the Animators’.

The two non-furry movies nominated for Best Animated Feature pulled together for their own first; this is the first time the category has featured two foreign language nominees, a rare occurrence in any category – outside of Foreign Language Film, obviously.

It was a good year for DreamWorks Animation. If you count Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit as a DreamWorks picture, they pulled ahead of Pixar as the most nominated studio in the category with their second two-nominee year, the first studio to pull off that feat. Disney’s home studio is the only other studio to have two nominees in a single year. However, it should be noted that DreamWorks is well behind Pixar for actual wins, and does still hold the record for worst reviewed nominee.

On the other hand, it was a terrible year for Pixar. Cars 2 had the dubious distinction of not only being the first Pixar movie to not be nominated for Best Animated Feature since the category began, but the first Pixar movie to not be nominated for anything at the Oscars.

How Rise of the Planet of the Apes may have won Rango the Oscar

For a while there, it really looked like The Adventures of Tintin might take the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Rango had the early lead, sure, but that was actually working against it as it was becoming old hat, while Tintin was the new hotness. I never really let on, but I was worried.

What cost it the nomination, which may have been the only thing costing it the Oscar, was obviously motion capture, but if the Annies could nominate it, what was the Academy Animators’ branch’s problem?

Well, in point of fact, the Animators’ branch do not actually solely nominate the Best Animated Feature award, and the Academy at large were being told by 20th Century Fox and Andy Serkis that motion capture was not animation, it was acting.

Serkis never had a chance to get a nomination for Best Supporting Actor (the fact that Caesar was the lead is beside the point), but a well-publicized campaign for his motion capture performance probably ended up killing any sympathy for motion capture in animation categories.

How Cars 2 may have cost Winnie the Pooh a nomination

The saddest thing about Cars 2 crashing and burning is how much director and Pixar head honcho John Lasseter wanted that nomination, darn it. In his defense, he totally does deserve not only a competitive Best Animated Feature nomination, but Oscar as well. Just for movies he made before the category existed.

Unfortunately, he seems to have forgotten that he was also executive producer on Winnie the Pooh, which totally deserved to be on that ballot.  A few pundits knocked its chances, saying it was long enough to qualify, but that was about it. Then A Cat in Paris, a weaker movie with an even shorter runtime, snuck in there.

Jon Lasseter had his priorities mixed up. If he had given up on a lost cause, and put his muscle behind the one good movie his name was behind in 2011, Winnie the Pooh could have been a contender, not just nominee-count padding.

The Razzies

Last month, I said 2011 was the furry movie anno mirabilis. But do not think that means that every furry movie out this year was peachy keen. I myself gave Happy Feet Two the dubious honor of second worst movie of the year.

The Golden Raspberry Awards, a.k.a. the Razzies, were nicer to that movie, but they did a number on sort-of-furry (it has werewolves) Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1, with nominations for Worst Picture, Worst Actor, Worst Actress, Worst Screen Ensemble, Worst Director, Worst Prequel/Remake/Rip-Off/Sequel, Worst Screen Couple and Worst Screenplay. Zookeeper also managed a Worst Supporting Actor nomination. However, neither movie actually won …, uh, received an award; Jack and Jill apparently managed to sweep the Razzies!

The Razzies also got competition this year in the form of the Soilies. However, their award names all consist of poop jokes, so they lost all right to judge anyone, and I did not even bother to check if they nominated anything furry.

Note: Higgs Raccoon contributed research to this section of the article.