Happy Feet & Danish Poet Top Animated Oscar Honors
The Oscar animation winners offered a few surprises as the top animation awards went to HAPPY FEET for Best Animated Feature and the indie 2D short THE DANISH POET (NFB) by Torill Kove won for Best Animated Short tonight (Feb. 25, 2007) during the 79th Annual Academy Awards at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood.
Echoing its earlier awards at the VES Awards, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST scored the big win for Best Visual Effects. Taking the stage to accept from ILM were John Knoll, Hal Hickel, Charles Gibson and Allen Hall.
The ceremony, hosted by Ellen DeGeneres, was televised live on ABC-TV. Unlike like last year’s broadcast, there was little in the way of animated bits, jokes or explorations of visual effects.
Cameron Diaz, voice of Princess Fiona from SHREK, presented the Animated Feature Film category.
It was a bit of a surprise that HAPPY FEET would beat out John Lasseter’s CARS, which had won the Annie, Golden Globe and PGA Awards. MONSTER HOUSE was also up for best feature. Animated characters from the three nominated flicks had been digitally placed in the seats during announcements, which included reactions by CARS and MONSTER HOUSE characters sharing their disappointment while HAPPPY FEET won and a surprised George Miller took the stage to accept. Australian-based vfx studio Animal Logic made HAPPY FEET as its first animated feature, rigged and animated using SOFTIMAGE | XSI.
Backstage, Miller, who won his first Oscar ever after three nominations for live-action films, said, "I never thought that I would be holding an Oscar for an animation. I honestly -- this is true -- I can say I didn't expect to win. Sitting next to John Lasseter, who I thought would win and has won Oscars before... I feel pretty good.”
He said he would be going back to, "live-action actors for a while, but I'm hooked on animation, and it's going to be in whatever movies I get to make. So, I guess we will keep doing -- we will keep doing animation. This new digital age is so significant, I think we will keep -- we will keep working in it, and it's fantastic. I'm so lucky to be working in film at the time when it's available."
Miller talked about lessons learned doing animation with VFXWORLD. "I mean, having had some experience with the big movies," Miller said. "I did sort of understand a little bit what was happening, but I had no idea what kind of tsunami of learning I had when I got into animation. The basic principles of storytelling are very, very similar, but you can deconstruct everything. You can work a great deal on everything. I learned to be very painstaking. I'm worried when I get to a live-action set that I won't have a virtual camera or I can change a performance by asking an animator to just, you know, hold a blink an extra frame or two.
"I think there's also a convergence between animation and what we call basic, regular filmmaking. I think we are starting to see that in all the visual effects movies, and once we start to conquer the visual effects, it will be just normal for every kind of movie you get into. When you look at something like Gollum from LORD OF THE RINGS, he was essentially animated performance captured. That's in most of the movies now. It's an interesting new age we are working in. I'm very happy to be part of it."
AWN asked Miller if he'd ever do a film animating people, as well as animals, and if he would recommend to other live-action directors that they make a move into animation. He responded, "We didn't have the courage to do people in HAPPY FEET. As you know, the humans that appear at the end of the movie are live-action humans. I think that's -- that's in generations to come. There's something about the subtlety of the human being, which you really can't capture unless they stylize them in the way that it was done, say, in THE INCREDIBLES or so on. That's not to say that Disney didn't do great work in PINOCCHIO and all of those sorts of things.
Echoing its earlier awards at the VES Awards, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST scored the big win for Best Visual Effects. Taking the stage to accept from ILM were John Knoll, Hal Hickel, Charles Gibson and Allen Hall.
The ceremony, hosted by Ellen DeGeneres, was televised live on ABC-TV. Unlike like last year’s broadcast, there was little in the way of animated bits, jokes or explorations of visual effects.
Cameron Diaz, voice of Princess Fiona from SHREK, presented the Animated Feature Film category.
It was a bit of a surprise that HAPPY FEET would beat out John Lasseter’s CARS, which had won the Annie, Golden Globe and PGA Awards. MONSTER HOUSE was also up for best feature. Animated characters from the three nominated flicks had been digitally placed in the seats during announcements, which included reactions by CARS and MONSTER HOUSE characters sharing their disappointment while HAPPPY FEET won and a surprised George Miller took the stage to accept. Australian-based vfx studio Animal Logic made HAPPY FEET as its first animated feature, rigged and animated using SOFTIMAGE | XSI.
Backstage, Miller, who won his first Oscar ever after three nominations for live-action films, said, "I never thought that I would be holding an Oscar for an animation. I honestly -- this is true -- I can say I didn't expect to win. Sitting next to John Lasseter, who I thought would win and has won Oscars before... I feel pretty good.”
He said he would be going back to, "live-action actors for a while, but I'm hooked on animation, and it's going to be in whatever movies I get to make. So, I guess we will keep doing -- we will keep doing animation. This new digital age is so significant, I think we will keep -- we will keep working in it, and it's fantastic. I'm so lucky to be working in film at the time when it's available."
Miller talked about lessons learned doing animation with VFXWORLD. "I mean, having had some experience with the big movies," Miller said. "I did sort of understand a little bit what was happening, but I had no idea what kind of tsunami of learning I had when I got into animation. The basic principles of storytelling are very, very similar, but you can deconstruct everything. You can work a great deal on everything. I learned to be very painstaking. I'm worried when I get to a live-action set that I won't have a virtual camera or I can change a performance by asking an animator to just, you know, hold a blink an extra frame or two.
"I think there's also a convergence between animation and what we call basic, regular filmmaking. I think we are starting to see that in all the visual effects movies, and once we start to conquer the visual effects, it will be just normal for every kind of movie you get into. When you look at something like Gollum from LORD OF THE RINGS, he was essentially animated performance captured. That's in most of the movies now. It's an interesting new age we are working in. I'm very happy to be part of it."
AWN asked Miller if he'd ever do a film animating people, as well as animals, and if he would recommend to other live-action directors that they make a move into animation. He responded, "We didn't have the courage to do people in HAPPY FEET. As you know, the humans that appear at the end of the movie are live-action humans. I think that's -- that's in generations to come. There's something about the subtlety of the human being, which you really can't capture unless they stylize them in the way that it was done, say, in THE INCREDIBLES or so on. That's not to say that Disney didn't do great work in PINOCCHIO and all of those sorts of things.
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