Disney Dominate the 2017 Academy Awards
The 89th Academy Awards has announced its winners. Whilst best picture was anyones guess right up until they handed the award to the wrong guy, here on Skwigly we thought we would stick to the mishap free animation highlights.
This year was nominated by Disney titles. In a year that struggled to fill its nominees category for animated shorts category with variety Alan Barillaro’s Piper won Pixar it’s first short film academy award in 16 years. In 2001 For the Birds was the last Pixar short to win and it was a bird who took it away breaking their run of returning home empty handed.
It was a film oddly devoid of birds (and lizard and primates for that matter) Zootropolis (Zootopia) that took home the feature animation award for directors Rich Moore and Byron Howard. Disney found itself up against a wider variety of styles than it did in the shorts category, including itself as it was pitted against Moana, but it was the older feature that took away the award breaking the BAFTA prediction trick of films that are both nominated and win in the UK going on to win an Oscar. Disney feature titles (a mix of mainly Pixar films) have now won for the 9th time in a decade loosing out only in 2011 when they were not nominated.
In the Visual Effects category Robert Legato, Adam Valdez, Andrew R. Jones and Dan Lemmon won on behalf of The Jungle Book the celebrated “live action”, thoughnotreallyliveactionbecausebasicallyallofitisanimated-remake of the 1969 Disney feature of the same name.
In our yearly poll Skwigly readers voted for Blind Vaysha for Animated Short, Kubo and the Two Strings for VFX and My Life as a Courgette for Best Feature. They may be disappointed to see three Disney wins for films crammed with animated animals. Once more animation has been reduced to a single company making films about animals, high quality films about animals but all the same, it leaves one to wonder when the academy will begin to take animation seriously and present its members with a scope of the variety animation is capable of?