Just forget the words and sing along

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Hey! Here's something that almost slipped by me. The Academy Awards folks have come forward and revealed that these are all the films released this year that qualify for the Best Animated Film Oscar:

Chicken Little - Disney's first CGI movie, in theaters now!

Gulliver's Travel - I can find no information on this movie.

Hoodwinked - More on this further down

Howl's Moving Castle - Hayao Miayazaki's latest

Madagascar - Dreamwork's latest

Robots - Blue Sky's latest; came out in the spring

Steamboy - The latest from the guy who did Akira, but sadly not as good.

Tim Burton's Corpse Bride - Good, but not Oscar worthy.

Valiant - Did ANYBODY see this in the theatre?

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit - Considered to be the front runner, cuz Oscar just loves Wallace and Gromit.

So, we know the drill. This will be narrowed down to three nominations, which will be announced with ALL the other Oscar nominations in January. And then, the Oscars will be on TV at the end of February.

Now, welcome to "further down." You may remember I did my CGI Scorecard column a few weeks back, well, here's a few other CGI films on the horizon that should be noted:

Hoodwinked - This one comes out in December. It's actually an independent film. It was picked up by the Weinstein Company, re-dubbed with a big name voice cast, and is getting a nation-wide release. It's a sarcastic (ie Shrek-like) retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. The plot: we all know the climax of Little Red Riding Hood, where Red Riding Hood is being chased around by the wolf, the wolf is being chased by the heroic woodsman, and granny's locked in the closet. Well, in this film, at this point the police come in, calm everyone down, and then try to sort out what happened. Each character then tells the tale of Little Red Riding Hood...from their point of view. Could be interesting, but I've seen the trailer, and its low budget indie roots still shine through.

Happy Feet - You knew it was just a matter of time before Warner Brothers got into the computer animation field. This is their first product, coming out November 2006, but the teaser will be in front of Harry Potter this Friday, and went online yesterday. It's nothing but singing and dancing penguins. Although, it has a good pedigree. The guy behind this one is George Miller, the Aussie director who gave us the Mad Max films for the grown-ups and the Babe films for the young-uns.

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