Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode II won Annie Awards for Best Animated Television Production, Writing, and Voice Acting for Ahmed Best’s Jar-Jar. But perhaps the biggest shock was the total shut-out of WALL-E – it was beat in nearly every category it was nominated for by Kung Fu Panda. Seriously. Kung Fu Panda. The hell?
Other winners include Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs and Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Kevin Kiner was up for Music in an Animated Television Production for the ‘Rising Malevolence’ episode of The Clone Wars, but lost out to Henry Jackman, Hans Zimmer & John Powell for Secrets of the Furious Five, a Kung Fu Panda spinoff.
That’s a shame that TCW lost for music. Kiner did a great job with the film. It was one of the high points for me from the movie.
It was a short form award – one of the episodes. I’ll clarify that in the post.
Three cheers for the Robot Chicken team!
Maybe the Annie voters were voting for… well, I don’t want to say style over substance, but perhaps style over realism. I agree that WALL-E was the best movie of the year, but its realistic approach (even using actors in some scenes) differentiated it from traditional animation (as well as previous Pixar pictures). Kung Fu Panda, on the other hand, was definitely a cartoon — and, by those standards, the best cartoon of the past decade. It was smart, hilarious, and had amazingly animation. Totally worth seeing.
I honestly can’t begrudge Kung Fu Panda too much, as I haven’t seen it, but every award? That just seems excessive.
FYI Kung Fu Panda’s director is a huge Star Wars fan — http://www.starwars.com/fans/rocks/news20080707.html
Neil Baker apparently voted for the awards…
http://blogs.starwars.com/bubbles/251
maybe you can ask him how Panda mopped up so thoroughly.
interesting that Futurama: Beast with a billion backs won for the best home entertainment — it really felt a bit disjointed as a story, and Bender’s Game (the next Futurama DVD) looked more fun, but maybe it missed the cutoff?