51st Annie Awards: Best Animated Feature 'Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse' Goes 7-For-7, 'Nimona' Wins 2

The TV side was dominated by 'Blue Eye Samurai' and 'Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur’

I have been absolutely terrible at covering awards. Golden Globes, didn't get around to posting the Primetime Emmy winners. The Children’s and Family Emmy Awards, I blew it on the entire process there. I think I was paralyzed by how much I wanted to split between my own prose and how much was copying the category listings. On Saturday night, the 51st Annie Awards did their thing celebrating animation and let a single film sweep all of its earned nominations as they tend to allow. In this case, Sony Pictures Animation’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse won all of its seven including Best Animated Feature. Even with that, there were still surprises to be had, because Blue Sky never dies.

After early presenter Eric Bauza got to lead a public rallying cry for the endangered Coyote vs. Acme to get the release it deserves than fall victim to tax writeoffs, the industry’s previous underdog, Nimona from Annapurna Animation, Netflix, and the ashes of Blue Sky Studios won two awards, of its show-leading nine it was nominated for. The first was Best Writing for a Feature, by Robert L. Baird and Lloyd Taylor against Robot Dreams’s Pablo Berger, Suzume’s Makoto Shinkai, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’s team of several, and Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, which was personally believed to be the favored film going in, and ended up the only other film to win multiple awards. The second was Best Voice Acting for a Feature, where Chloe Grace Moretz, who has been voice acting since childhood, won for voicing Nimona, beating Jack Black’s Bowser from The Super Mario Bros. Movie, David Hornsby’s Joker from Merry Little Batman, Tresi Gazal as Gwen Mallard in Migration and Hokuta Matsumura as Souta Munakata in Suzume.

Across the Spider-Verse’s Best Animated Feature win came against Nimona, The Boy and the Heron, Mutant Mayhem, and Suzume. Its other wins were for Directing in an Animated Feature by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson, Animated Effects in an Animated Production by Pav Grochola, Filippo Maccari, Naoki Kato, Nicola Finizio, and Edmond Boulet-Gilly, Character Design in an Animated Feature by Jesús Alonso Iglesias, Editorial in a Feature by…the team, Music in a Feature by Daniel Pemberton and Metro Boomin, and Production Design by Patrick O'Keefe and Dean Gordon. The Boy and the Heron won for Miyazaki’s storyboarding and Takeshi Honda for Character Animation. The seven wins are the same Across’s preceding film, 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse got, and the Annies have tended to settle who will get the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Wreck-It Ralph and The Mitchells vs. the Machines are marked exceptions.

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To use more Marvel productions wins to transition to the TV side, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, with its very vulnerable Rocket Raccoon, his tragically departed friends Lylla, Teef, and Floor, and two stages of Groot, won Best Character Animation in a Live Action Production, awarded to Fernando Herrera, Chris Hurtt, Nathan McConnel, Daniel Cabral, and Chris McGaw. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 won Outstanding Character Animation in a Video Game, beating, among others, TERF Wizard Game. Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur won three Annies with each nominee being a different episode. Jose Lopez won best character design for the episode “The Beyonder”, an episode that lost Best Animated Television/Broadcast Production for Children to the series finale of Hilda, Ben Juwono won best storyboarding for the episode “Goodnight Moon Girl”, and Diamond White, who had a presenting cluster with her co-star Fred Tatasciore, won best voice acting for the premiere episode “Moon Girl Landing”. Star Wars: Visions won two awards, for directing, which was awarded to Paul Young for “Screecher’s Reach”, and Best Music for “Aau's Song", awarded to Markus Wormstorm, Nadia Darries, and Dineo du Toit. “Screecher’s Reach” lost Editorial to Blue Eye Samurai’s "The Tale of the Ronin and the Bride" “Sith” lost Best Animated Effects to “All Evil Dreams and Angry Words” and Production Design to “The Great Fire of 1657”, and “I Am Your Mother” lost Character Animation to “Episodes 101, 104, and 106”. The show won Best Mature Audience TV Production for its pilot, “Hammerscale”. Elsewhere, Robot Dreams won Best Independent Animated Feature, Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire beat Pokémon: Path to the Peak for Best Miniseries, and Peanuts special Snoopy Presents: One-of-a-Kind Marcie won Best Special.

Source: Deadline