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Zootopia took home six awards at last nights ASIFA-Hollywood’s 44th annual Annie Awards, which were presented at Royce Hall on campus of University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to Best Feature Film, the Disney film also won Best Director, Outstanding Achievement in Character Design, Storyboarding, Voice Acting (Jason Bateman) and Writing in an animated feature. This pushed Disney to eleven wins out of the 31 awards at the show.

This morning the nominees for the 89th Academy Awards were announced in Beverly Hills California. In animation, we saw a good mix of big budget, popular films and smaller film releases. Disney came in with two nominations for best animated film, and Pixar struck out after wining last year with Inside Out. 

The Annies really like Pixar. A lot. In pretty well every category that the Pixar film Inside Out competed in, it won. Except for Animated Effects, where it was beat by The Good Dinosaur, also from Pixar.

France’s national film awards- the Césars- have been announced. With two animation categories, it is not unlike the Academy Awards, except the entrants are limited to French films. The ceremony will take place in Paris on February 26 at the Théâtre du Châtelet.

The critically acclaimed New York Int’l Children’s Film Festival has announced its 2016 jury and slate preview for the upcoming event, which runs February 26-March 20 in New York. Now in its 19th year, the Festival is the nation’s largest for children and teens and will present all new animated, live action, documentary and experimental shorts and features from approximately 30 countries.

Awards season is upon us, an the grand-daddy of all the awards shows announced their nominees early this morning. At 5:30 am, John Krasinski, Guillermo Del Toro & Ang Lee announced the selected few at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. Conspicuous by their absence are any films from Disney and DreamWorks; this years animation nominees show more of a foreign film blend than we have seen in previous years. Overall, Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Revenant was the big winner overall, taking in 11 total nominations. Jennifer Lawrence became the youngest woman- at 24- to garner four Best Actress nominations.

The Academy has announced this years medalists for the Student Academy Award. The medalists in the animation category are An Object at Rest, Soar, and Taking the Plunge. The specific placement for the films- gold, silver, and bronze- will be announced on September 17 at an awards ceremony in Beverly Hills, California. Animated shorts also showed up in the alternative category, with Chiaroscuro and Zoe both also placing there.

Let’s be honest, the big surprise at the Oscars this year in Animation was The Lego Movie being snubbed. But now that all is said and done, and the dust has settled…

Independent- and solo- animation film maker Don Hertzfeldt has won the best short film jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The prestigious award is all the more stunning in that Sundance does not segregate it’s animation short award from the other shorts- Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow (which premiered at the…

Philip Lord, director of the animated hit film  The Lego Movie from Lin Pictures and Warner Bros., has had the perfect response to his film not being picked for consideration for this years Best Animated film Oscar. Many feel that The Lego Movie was slighted by the Academy when they announced the nominees earlier this…