Category: Films (Page 78 of 85)

The complete list of 80th annual Academy Award nominations were announced Tuesday and Pixar’s Ratatouille did quite well with 5 nominations:

Original Screenplay: Diablo Cody, “Juno”; Nancy Oliver, “Lars and the Real Girl”; Tony Gilroy, “Michael Clayton”; Brad Bird, Jan Pinkava and Jim Capobianco, “Ratatouille”; Tamara Jenkins, “The Savages.”

Animated Feature Film: “Persepolis”; “Ratatouille”; “Surf’s Up.”

Sound Mixing: “The Bourne Ultimatum,””No Country for Old Men,””Ratatouille,””3:10 to Yuma,””Transformers.”

Sound Editing: “The Bourne Ultimatum,””No Country for Old Men,””Ratatouille,””There Will Be Blood,””Transformers.”

Original Score: “Atonement,” Dario Marianelli; “The Kite Runner,” Alberto Iglesias; “Michael Clayton,” James Newton Howard; “Ratatouille,” Michael Giacchino; “3:10 to Yuma,” Marco Beltrami.

What award hasn’t Pixar’s Ratatouille won? It was announced today that the film about a rat who’s dream is to be a chef was honored with the Golden Tomato award, awarded to the best-reviewed films of the previous year as determined by the Web site RottenTomatoes.com, which compiles reviews from print, online and broadcast film critics.

The Moldy Tomato, awarded to the worst-reviewed film of the year, was ‘awarded’ to some movie I’ve never heard of called “Because I Said So.”

For the complete list of winners, head on over to RottenTomatoes.

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has announced the nominees for the 2008 Orange British Academy Film Awards. In the Animated Film category we have Ratatouille, The Simpsons Movie and Shrek the Third. The nominees in the Short Animation category include The Pearce Sisters, The Crumblegiant and Head Over Heels.

A complete list of nominees is available at BAFTA

The 65th annual Golden Globes winners were announced Sunday at a news conference held by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in Beverly Hills, California. The winner in the Best Animated Film category was Ratatouille. It was up against Bee Movie and The Simpsons Movie… not much of a competition. Now it’s time to look forward to the Oscars where Ratatouille will hopefully win as well. It truly deserves it.

And in non-animated news, No Country for Old Men won for Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem and Best Screenplay: Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. If you haven’t seen this movie, please do yourself a great favor and head to your local theater. It truly is a great movie.

The Hollywood Reporter has a very cool feature up on their site that features the screenwriters for the Golden Globe nominated films, which includes Ratatouille. Here is what Brad Bird had to say:

“I came way late into the project. When I became involved, (Pixar) had the character design, they had the premise and they had two of the most important sets ‘built’ in the computer. But they were at a crisis point. Everyone loved the idea and the way it was looking, but the story was not at the point it needed to be. I had a year and a half to write a whole new script, do a brand-new set of reels, recast the movie, record all the sound, cut the sound to a new storyboard, design 22 of the 25 sets and get it all done. These things usually take four to five years.

It was a hard script to write, and I had to write it quickly because we had committed to a start date for the animation; I had to have parts of the script ready to go before the rest was finalized. The basic story stayed the same: It was about a rat named Remy who wanted to be a cook. But I changed a lot of things. I killed off Gusteau, the main character Remy was trying to please — then made him come back as part of his imagination.

I reworked it structurally a lot and added a few characters. Then I took my story outline and wrote a brand-new screenplay and did a whole new soundtrack and a set of story reels. I don’t think it is in any significant way different to write a screenplay for an animated film than a live-action one. What’s different is that I know what animators can do and I try to write scenes that I myself would want to animate.

I used to be an animator and know what it is like to be assigned these deathly scenes where you have to inject a lot of shtick to make them interesting to watch. What makes (an animation screenplay) work is having a heightened sensibility that is a little bit caricatured. Many people view that as a negative because caricature is meant to suggest over-the-top. But I view the word caricature in a much more positive sense. Good caricature simplifies things down to the essence.”

The nominees for the 6th Annual VES Awards, scheduled to take place on February 10 at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End leads with seven nominations, followed by Transformers with five. Steven Speilberg will also receive the VES Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of the impact he has had on visual effects.

Two sequences in Ratatouille are up for Outstanding Effects in an Animated Motion Picture. The sequences will go up against scenes from Beowulf, Shrek the Third and Surf’s Up.

Surf’s Up has two characters—Cody and Chicken Joe—nominated for Outstanding Animated Character in an Animated Motion Picture. King Harold from Shrek the Third, Beowulf, and Colette from Ratatouille are also in the running.

There are many more categories. Too many to list. If you would like, you can view the entire list of nominees at www.vesawards.com

Last night, the 13th annual Critics’ Choice Awards aired on TV. No surprise here, Ratatouille won the awards for best animated feature. Below is the complete list of winners in case you’re wondering:

Best Picture: “No Country for Old Men”
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, “There Will Be Blood”
Best Actress: Julie Christie, “Away From Her”
Best Supporting actor: Javier Bardem, “No Country for Old Men”
Best Supporting actress: Amy Ryan, “Gone Baby Gone”
Best Acting ensemble: “Hairspray”
Best Director: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, “No Country for Old Men”
Best Writer: Diablo Cody, “Juno”
Best Animated feature: “Ratatouille”
Best Young actor: Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, “The Kite Runner”
Best Young actress: Nikki Blonsky, “Hairspray”
Best Comedy movie: “Juno”
Best Family film (live action): “Enchanted”
Best Picture made for television: “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”
Best Foreign language film: “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”
Best Song: “Falling Slowly,” Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, “Once”
Best Composer: Jonny Greenwood, “There Will Be Blood”
Best Documentary feature: “Sicko”
Joel Siegel award: Don Cheadle

2008 is going to be an exciting year for animation fans with seven (so far) awesome (hopefully) movies from the major movie studios. Pixar will release the highly-anticipated WALL-E and DreamWorks will release TWO movies this year: Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar: The Crate Escape. Check out the full schedule below:

January 11 – The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything – A VeggieTales Movie (Universal)
March 14 – Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! (Fox)
June 6 – Kung Fu Panda (DreamWorks Animation)
June 27 – WALL-E (Pixar)
November 7 – Madagascar: The Crate Escape (DreamWorks Animation)
November 26 – Bolt (Disney)
December 19 – The Tale of Despereaux (Universal)

Via Animated News

The Library of Congress has named 25 more motion pictures to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, including the classic Disney short, “Three Little Pigs.”

Each year the Librarian of Congress, with advice from the National Film Preservation Board, names 25 films to the National Film Registry to be preserved for all time. The films are chosen because they are “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant. This year’s selections bring to 475 the number of motion pictures in the registry.

Three Little Pigs (1933)
Voted the 11th-best cartoon of all time in a 1990s poll of animators, “Three Little Pigs” falls midway through a series of classic shorts (“Skeleton Dance,” “The Band Concert,” “The Old Mill,”) that Walt Disney produced as he learned and refined the art of animation; each film marked another development in his path toward the 1937 feature “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The wildly popular “Three Little Pigs” proved a landmark in “personality animation”— each of the three pigs had a different personality—and the title tune “Who’s Afraid of
the Big Bad Wolf” became a Depression-era anthem.

Yet another award for Pixar’s Ratatouille has been awarded. This time it’s the fine folks over at RottenTomatoes who have placed Ratatouille in 13th place in their annual Top 20 Best of the Year list.

IFC has named their Five Best Directorial Debuts of 2007 and one of them is Persepolis’ director, Marjane Satrapi.

Satrapi’s film isn’t just a faithful adaptation but an energized improvement of its source material, lending the author’s personal saga of oppression and exile an aesthetic fluidity and vitality that few animated efforts, of this year or any other, can match.