With 14 nominations, Disney/Pixar's hit Inside Out is clearly the frontrunner in the animated feature competition of the 43rd annual Annie Awards for animation. There were also some perhaps unexpected omissions in certain categories when the nominations were announced on Tuesday, including Anomalisa's Oscar-winning writer Charlie Kaufman in the writing category.
The nominees for best animated feature are Inside Out, Disney/Pixar's The Good Dinosaur, Fox/Blue Sky's The Peanuts Movie, Aardman Animations' Shaun the Sheep Movie, and Anomalisa, distributed by Paramount. A new category for best animated indie feature includes a trio of films from indie distributor GKIDS: Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, the Salma Hayek-produced film based on the poems of Gibran; When Marnie Was There from Japan's Studio Ghibli; and Brazil's Boy and the World.
Following Inside Out, the most mentions in feature categories went to Good Dinosaur with nine noms and Universal/Illumination Entertainment's Minions with eight. All three reached these numbers by earning multiple nominations in categories including character design, storyboarding or voice acting. However, Good Dinosaur and Minions both failed to earn mentions for direction, and Minions was additionally passed over for best animated feature.
Anomalisa earned five nominations, including for best animated feature, music, voice acting, editing and directing for Kaufman and Duke Johnson. But Kaufman was passed over for writing the dark comedy. Nominations in the writing category went to just three pics: Inside Out, Shaun the Sheep and When Marnie Was There.
The stop-motion Shaun the Sheep earned a total of five mentions, for best animated feature, directing, writing, editing and production design. Peanuts — based on the Charles Schulz comic strip — also earned five noms, for best animated feature, directing, character design and two for voice acting.
In addition to Anomalisa, Inside Out, Peanuts and Shaun the Sheep, nominations for directing went to the helmers of The Prophet, When Marnie Was There and Extraordinary Tales.
In total, GKIDS' The Prophet and Marnie earned three nominations each and Boy and the World earned four. A year ago, a pair of GKIDS movies — Song of the Sea and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya — earned Oscar noms for best animated feature, not leaving room for The Lego Movie.
Presented by the International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood, the 43rd Annual Annie Awards are set to be held Feb. 6 at UCLA’s Royce Hall.
The complete list of nominees follows:
