Awards Offer Plenty to Get Animated About

With none of the to-do of the Oscar and Emmy nominations, the animation industry has announced the contenders for the 28th annual Annie awards, to be presented Nov. 11 at Glendale’s Alex Theatre.

Founded by June Foray, the voice of Rocky, the Flying Squirrel, the Annies are awarded each year by ASIFA-Hollywood, the local branch of the International Animated Film Society. If you scan the list of nominated films and TV shows announced earlier this week, you’ll see that once again the majority were made in the Valley, home to most of the industry’s studios, large and small.

Last year, the awards were dominated by “The Iron Giant,” a film about a boy and a towering robot that critics and animators loved but few moviegoers saw, largely because it was under-promoted by Warner Bros. “The Iron Giant” was nominated for a remarkable 15 Annies and won nine, including best director (Brad Bird) and best animated feature.

This year no single film dominates as “Giant” did. Indeed the nominations for the most coveted prize--Outstanding Achievement in an Animated Theatrical Feature--include a couple of surprises, notably the nomination of “Titan A.E.” Made at 20th Century Fox’s Animation Studio in Phoenix and co-directed by the legendary Don Bluth, “Titan A.E.” was an $85-million box-office disaster, a flop of such magnitude that it is blamed for Fox’s decision to shutter the studio in June.

The other nominated features are Disney’s “Fantasia/2000,” “Toy Story 2” from Disney and Pixar, “The Road to El Dorado” from DreamWorks and “Chicken Run” from Pathe, Aardman and DreamWorks. “Chicken Run,” an all-poultry take on “The Great Escape,” was directed by British animator Nick Park of Wallace & Gromit fame and his Aardman partner, Peter Lord. At last year’s Annies, it was the movie animators were already talking about.

To get an informed take on this year’s slate from someone who follows the business but is outside it, I called animation historian John Canemaker, director of animation at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Canemaker is the biographer of the first great American animator, Winsor McCay, and a frequent commentator on animation.

“I think it’s really going to be a tough choice between ‘Toy Story 2’ and ‘Chicken Run,’ ” Canemaker says, from his office in Manhattan. As he notes, both movies are three-dimensional, in different ways--the computer-generated “Toy Story 2” because of its state-of-the-art digital technology and “Chicken Run” because it is Claymation, its action painstakingly achieved by manipulating three-dimensional Plasticine models, then filming them.

“Chicken Run,” with its stop-motion technique, harks back to the very beginnings of animation, Canemaker points out, while “Toy Story 2” uses technology Pixar developed as the film was being made. Yet both movies are funny, unusual and enormously appealing. “You cared about the characters,” Canemaker says. And both have extraordinarily strong, character-driven stories.

Like everyone else on the planet, Canemaker loved the original “Toy Story.” “The first one was marvelous,” he says, but he thinks the sequel reaches an even higher level technologically and in terms of depth of story and characterization.

As to “The Road to El Dorado,” DreamWorks’ comic buddy movie set in a 16th century New Spain that never was, Canemaker saw flaws as well as strengths. It had very good character animation, he says, “but it often didn’t stick to the story . . . and there were a lot of holes in the story.”

Canemaker liked many things about “Fantasia/2000,” including the sequence that accompanied Igor Stravinsky’s “Firebird” Suite. The original “Fantasia” is a movie that Canemaker knows as well: He appears in the DVD featuring both films that is coming out this fall (a documentary about how they were made is part of the package).

Of “Fantasia/2000,” he says, “It could have been a little more daring in its music and its images.” But Canemaker views the film as a fairly successful movie in its own right and as a wonderful precedent. Apparently Disney intends to make future versions of the film and Canemaker is excited at the opportunity for experimentation these marriages of music and images represent. He can imagine a John Cage “Fantasia” or a rock ‘n’ roll one, and versions that push the envelope in nonmusical ways as well, perhaps by using virtual-reality technology.

There has been much speculation on where “Titan A.E.” went wrong. Some observers think the problem started with a title that was opaque to the point of meaninglessness. Asked if he was surprised to see the film on the Annies list, especially in the absence of a movie like “Princess Mononoke” that many animators admired, Canemaker didn’t hesitate a nanosecond before saying “Yes.”

Although you may quibble about the nominated films, Canemaker sees their variety as evidence of the diversity that makes the current animation scene so interesting. Once there was only one style in feature animation--Disney’s. Now even Disney has many styles.

“I think it’s a great predictor of what is to come,” Canemaker says of the Annies’ variegated lineup.

Canemaker has a new book coming out next year on some of the legends of animation--”Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men.”

I also asked Brad Bird what he thought of the films in contention. Bird, whose “Iron Giant” was a triumph of traditional two-dimensional animation, is now at Pixar, which all but created 3-D animation. There he is working on an original project that he can’t yet talk about.

Asked his pick for best feature, Bird says, “I’m a big fan, not only of ‘Toy Story 2,’ but of ‘Chicken Run.’ ” “Toy Story 2” is part of what attracted him to Pixar, he says, “and I’m a Nick Park fan from way back.”

Bird has the sense there were fewer animated features this year and that the industry seems to feel the only two-dimensional projects that can make it are based on hit TV shows or from Disney. But Bird believes the type of animation doesn’t make the picture.

“I think there’s this stupid lemming rush to CG [computer-generated] films now,” he says. “People don’t seem to get that it’s about the stories.”

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Spotlight appears each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.