37th Annual Annie Award Winners

This season's Annie Awards came to a close this past weekend, honoring a select few within the animation community for their success in various categories of group or individual production in the areas of feature, television, or home video animation. While the Pixar animated movie Up took home two of the night's top awards (Best Animated Feature; Directing in Feature), additional highlights include awards for character animation and effects for Disney's The Princess and the Frog, and a handful of awards for Nickelodeon's computer animated TV series The Penguins of Madagascar.

LAIKA's stop-action feature presentation Coraline, which initially stood atop of the field with a commanding lead in nominations, brought home awards in the categories of Production Design, Character Design, and Music, all well-deserved.

Category winners for the 37th Annual Annie Awards are available on the following pages of this AnimationInsider.net news article; winners are labeled in italics.

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Key productions headlining the awards ceremony included LAIKA's fantasy-adventure Coraline, directed by Henry Selick; Cartoon Network's The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack; and the Walt Disney Animation Studios' television short film "Prep & Landing." Coraline, the stop-action animated adaptation of the popular dark novel, reigned in ten nominations, including Best Animated Feature, Storyboarding (Chris Butler), and Production Design (Christopher Appelhans and Tadahiro Uesugi).

As expected, Pixar's latest hit Up has its fare share of nominations as well: Animated Affects (Eric Froemling), Character Animation (Daniel Nguyen), and Directing (Pete Docter). Smaller-budget feature films, produced primarily outside of the United States, such as Cartoon Saloon's Brendan and the Secret of Kells and Starz Animation Toronto's 9, are also in the mix for Best Animated Feature or various individual production categories.

A relatively waning landscape for cartoons on American television provides a less diverse field than past years have allowed, however, the 37th Annie Awards still featured competitive categories for Music in a Television Production, Writing in a Television Production, and Storyboarding in a Television Production, which includes, among others, the work of Joe Mateo ("Prep & Landing"), Sunil Hall (The Mighty B!), and Adam Van Wyk (The Spectacular Spider-Man).

The juried awards this year will include a trio of animation notables for the Winsor McCay Award: Bruce Timm, Tim Burton, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. The Winsor McCay Award may be awarded to a maximum of three individuals in recognition of lifetime or career contributions to the art of animation in producing, directing, designing, writing, technical work, music, or for other endeavors which exhibit outstanding contributions to excellence in animation.