'Wall-E' Dealt Second Awards Snub For Its Lack of Celebrity-Voiced Pandas
America, this is getting ridiculous. All Wall-E tried to do is save Earth, and now you're repaying the little robot with a series of awards snubs that put its Best Animated Film Oscar into question.
Sure, we always figured Wall-E was a longshot for a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars (though, Frost/Nixon? You really cared about that, huh? Go figure). However, this latest dis is just egregious. Take it away, Slashfilm:
WALL-E got completely snubbed at the 36th Annual Annie Awards. For those of you who don’t know, the Annie Awards is an all-animation award show presented by the International Animated Film Association, ASIFA-Hollywood since 1972. The awards range form Character Animation in a Feature Presentation to Production Design in an Animated Feature Production, the the more obvious, more prestigious Best Animated Feature award.
DreamWorks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda beat WALL-E in every single category, including Best Animated Feature, Animated Effects, Character Animation, Directing in an Animated Feature, Production Design, Storyboarding, and Voice Acting categories. WALL-E didn’t even receive nominations in the Writing, Music, and Character Design categories. In Fact, Kung Fu Panda ended up taking home 15 statues in all (including the short film spin-off).
The Best Animated Feature win stunned Panda co-director John Stevenson into making an expletive-filled speech, though many of the same words were hurled at DreamWorks from online quarters, as the studio just happened to be a key sponsor of the Annies in the year its Panda pulled this upset. Others, though, are noting that the Annies tend to reward more expressive character designs; in other words, Wall-E should have been voiced by Zac Efron and had a Silly-Putty face with dynamic eyebrows. Still, that doesn't quite account for Panda's wins over Wall-E in screenplay (!), directing (!!), and production design.
Should we be worried about the little robot's chances at a Best Animated Film Oscar? Maybe briefly—though we're sure that the rest of the Academy will help even out whatever weird animator rivalry reared its head at the Annies. We're sure that the indomitable Wall-E is taking the news all right, but we've heard that EVE has reduced DreamWorks, the Annies, and UCLA's Royce Hall (where the event took place) to a steaming crater. Can't say we blame her!