Here we have the 48th Annie Awards and as really, really big fan of animation, I definitely had to check this one out. It aired originally back in April already, so soon half a year gone, but took me a while to get here, also because it never really had an imdb title page until I added one a few days ago. As you can see from the number in the title, these awards have existed for a really long time. Do the maths and you get back to the early/mid 1970s already. Wooow I surely did not expect the animation Oscars too have such a long tradition to be honest, but I guess there was really only less quantity back in the day in terms of animation, not necessarily less quality. I must admit that I cannot think of really many animated movies from the 1970s though. Okay, two more years and we have the big occasion. 50th Annie Awards. I really hope that until then things look broghter again because this one here was honestly not the greatest Annie edition in history. Of course, the pandemic also got in the way once again and maybe it won't be there in 2023 anymore. Hopefully not get in the way of the 2022 Annies either. The consequence was that this show was basically a virtual ceremony. There was no arena or something where this took place, but the announcers did their job from home and the recipients also received their Annie Awards quite a while before the night of the event already. A bit of a pity. The surprise element for the viewers is of course still there, but the surprise element with the winners is nothing featured during that show. They received the awards off camera and also the notice that they won. Or lost.
The entire show ran for a bit under two hours, but easily over 100 minutes. This includes commercial breaks already too. Then again, the commercial breaks were no traditional commercial breaks. Most of the time, we just see previews or trailers for upcoming animated stuff or television companies / broadcast stations congratulating their projects for the nominations and even wins. Yep, of course this is not just all about theatrical releases, but also good old television stuff. I think the level of the winners looked fairly okay overall I suppose. I got indeed curious to check out some of the shows and movies featured in here. Both winners and nominees. Also the nomination is a success already. However, here I must also talk about what I wrote in the title of my review. You should not mistake the content promoted and honored in here for the event. I don't think it was a particularly good awards show. Not a terrible one either, but they could have done better. And with that I am not only talking about the possibility of actually letting people in and really make it a ceremony instead of a collection of video snippets basically. If you take a look at the "cast" list, you can see some of the people featured on here. Giacchino is of course a bit of a legend, not exclusively in terms of animation and he's kinda nice to see. Most presenters were really in charge of several categories that night, so they did not have to film at even more people's homes I assume. But nice that they got folks like Giacchino or Docter to appear here. Or Tartakovsky, even if I kinda disagree with his little video in the shower being so funny or memorable that they had to include it several times, the second occasion as some kind of "did you see" highlight segment.
Josh Gad from Frozen was in here too, had maybe more screen time than almost everybody else, but yeah, while I like his work as Olaf, and especially the film(s) linked to that, he did not do too much for me here. His little running gag that nobody is there to present with him got old pretty quickly and same applied to the Harrison Ford and Gal Gadot parodies and whoever else he picked. I forgot already. Well, shows you that it was rather forgettable. Matthew Rhys, one of the other (not too many) somewhat big names here, only showed up really briefly at the very end. Then there was a not so young anymore, blonde woman and she was maybe the closest this show had to a host. She did nothing for me either and I am kinda glad she was not featured that frequently. I mean come on, with everybody handing out so many awards, you don't need a host for a virtual ceremony, especially as she did basically nothing but announce the announcers on some occasion. The rest was what you see on many awards shows. There was a segment that includes those people from the animation industry that died over the course of the last 52 weeks (one of the better aspects of the evening for sure) and also something similar to lifetime achievement awards was handed out (also not too bad). I must say the key ingredient of the night, i.e. The actual awards, felt a bit rushed here and there unfortunately. I think they could have done better in that field, especially when it comes to emphasizing which film won. You can never really remember the name sof the people immediately and you also don't recognize them like actors right away, so yeah, maybe get in a more viewer-friendly approach for 2022 there.
What else can I say? Oh yes, the big winner of the night was of course Soul and not very far behind there was Wolfwalkers. I am still curious to see them both at some point. These were also the only two films that won more than one award. And easily so with seven and five respectively. Also you came across some names like Ub Iwerks that are truly legends from the branch, heard some names you do not necessarily connect with animation like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross from Nine Inch Nails (they seem to be really rooted in the soundtrack business now, also in terms of projects without Fincher), even if they weren't part of the ceremony. Oh yeah, the video game category was also pretty interesting because I knew all the nominees at least by name and also played some of them (League of Legends, okay that nomination surprised me indeed). I guess this is pretty much it. I wish this could have been a better ceremony and very brief inclusions like people named Sue Shakespeare (that's even better than Liz Lemon, fitting reference with Tina Fey's work on Soul) can only keep you interested for so long. I was a bit surprised to see that the aforementioned Fey was not even nominated for her voice acting here because she won awards at other events for that, but here the trophy went to the young Eva Whittaker from Wolfwalkers and there could not be a bigger contrast in terms of gender, but especially age between her and the super experienced David Bradley and these two were presented with awards almost the the same time. Whittaker by the way also presented herself.
So yeah, I give the Annie Awards 2022 a thumbs-down all in all and suggest you skip the watch here. It would be really nice if the upcoming edition or maybe even those in the next years are improved again, but yeah they surely had some massive obstacles this year despite somewhat taking the easy way out. If you wonder what new animated movies and series and specials have been released lately, then it's maybe enough to check out the list of winners and nominees here and there is not really much of a need to watch this event. Even if you totally adore animation and animated movies in all sizes and shapes like I do, you will perhaps (no, probably) be rather underwhelmed by the outcome. It probably helps, just like with every other awards show, if you have projects and people to cheer for, so having seen a great deal of the nominated stuff might not be the worst idea. The one thing I liked or maybe what I liked the most was that they really got in pretty much all categories, so no disrespect shown to some artists in less spectacular departments. But there is a downside to that too, namely that it did feel very rushed on more than just a few occasions and unless you somehow work yourself in animation, it also wasn't too easy to understand always what it was exactly that the winners were doing. So yeah, maybe fewer categories or, even better (I think), a longer ceremony would have been the way to go there. Now really time to finish. It was simply not enough overall, but luckily also not as bad as the Oscar-winning Hair Love from which they also got the director (I think it was) to present an Annie Award. I would not have been too happy had I received that one.
The entire show ran for a bit under two hours, but easily over 100 minutes. This includes commercial breaks already too. Then again, the commercial breaks were no traditional commercial breaks. Most of the time, we just see previews or trailers for upcoming animated stuff or television companies / broadcast stations congratulating their projects for the nominations and even wins. Yep, of course this is not just all about theatrical releases, but also good old television stuff. I think the level of the winners looked fairly okay overall I suppose. I got indeed curious to check out some of the shows and movies featured in here. Both winners and nominees. Also the nomination is a success already. However, here I must also talk about what I wrote in the title of my review. You should not mistake the content promoted and honored in here for the event. I don't think it was a particularly good awards show. Not a terrible one either, but they could have done better. And with that I am not only talking about the possibility of actually letting people in and really make it a ceremony instead of a collection of video snippets basically. If you take a look at the "cast" list, you can see some of the people featured on here. Giacchino is of course a bit of a legend, not exclusively in terms of animation and he's kinda nice to see. Most presenters were really in charge of several categories that night, so they did not have to film at even more people's homes I assume. But nice that they got folks like Giacchino or Docter to appear here. Or Tartakovsky, even if I kinda disagree with his little video in the shower being so funny or memorable that they had to include it several times, the second occasion as some kind of "did you see" highlight segment.
Josh Gad from Frozen was in here too, had maybe more screen time than almost everybody else, but yeah, while I like his work as Olaf, and especially the film(s) linked to that, he did not do too much for me here. His little running gag that nobody is there to present with him got old pretty quickly and same applied to the Harrison Ford and Gal Gadot parodies and whoever else he picked. I forgot already. Well, shows you that it was rather forgettable. Matthew Rhys, one of the other (not too many) somewhat big names here, only showed up really briefly at the very end. Then there was a not so young anymore, blonde woman and she was maybe the closest this show had to a host. She did nothing for me either and I am kinda glad she was not featured that frequently. I mean come on, with everybody handing out so many awards, you don't need a host for a virtual ceremony, especially as she did basically nothing but announce the announcers on some occasion. The rest was what you see on many awards shows. There was a segment that includes those people from the animation industry that died over the course of the last 52 weeks (one of the better aspects of the evening for sure) and also something similar to lifetime achievement awards was handed out (also not too bad). I must say the key ingredient of the night, i.e. The actual awards, felt a bit rushed here and there unfortunately. I think they could have done better in that field, especially when it comes to emphasizing which film won. You can never really remember the name sof the people immediately and you also don't recognize them like actors right away, so yeah, maybe get in a more viewer-friendly approach for 2022 there.
What else can I say? Oh yes, the big winner of the night was of course Soul and not very far behind there was Wolfwalkers. I am still curious to see them both at some point. These were also the only two films that won more than one award. And easily so with seven and five respectively. Also you came across some names like Ub Iwerks that are truly legends from the branch, heard some names you do not necessarily connect with animation like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross from Nine Inch Nails (they seem to be really rooted in the soundtrack business now, also in terms of projects without Fincher), even if they weren't part of the ceremony. Oh yeah, the video game category was also pretty interesting because I knew all the nominees at least by name and also played some of them (League of Legends, okay that nomination surprised me indeed). I guess this is pretty much it. I wish this could have been a better ceremony and very brief inclusions like people named Sue Shakespeare (that's even better than Liz Lemon, fitting reference with Tina Fey's work on Soul) can only keep you interested for so long. I was a bit surprised to see that the aforementioned Fey was not even nominated for her voice acting here because she won awards at other events for that, but here the trophy went to the young Eva Whittaker from Wolfwalkers and there could not be a bigger contrast in terms of gender, but especially age between her and the super experienced David Bradley and these two were presented with awards almost the the same time. Whittaker by the way also presented herself.
So yeah, I give the Annie Awards 2022 a thumbs-down all in all and suggest you skip the watch here. It would be really nice if the upcoming edition or maybe even those in the next years are improved again, but yeah they surely had some massive obstacles this year despite somewhat taking the easy way out. If you wonder what new animated movies and series and specials have been released lately, then it's maybe enough to check out the list of winners and nominees here and there is not really much of a need to watch this event. Even if you totally adore animation and animated movies in all sizes and shapes like I do, you will perhaps (no, probably) be rather underwhelmed by the outcome. It probably helps, just like with every other awards show, if you have projects and people to cheer for, so having seen a great deal of the nominated stuff might not be the worst idea. The one thing I liked or maybe what I liked the most was that they really got in pretty much all categories, so no disrespect shown to some artists in less spectacular departments. But there is a downside to that too, namely that it did feel very rushed on more than just a few occasions and unless you somehow work yourself in animation, it also wasn't too easy to understand always what it was exactly that the winners were doing. So yeah, maybe fewer categories or, even better (I think), a longer ceremony would have been the way to go there. Now really time to finish. It was simply not enough overall, but luckily also not as bad as the Oscar-winning Hair Love from which they also got the director (I think it was) to present an Annie Award. I would not have been too happy had I received that one.