Animation Celebration

As 26-year-olds do, the Annies are beginning to grow up. The Oscars of the animation industry, the Annies were awarded last Friday at Glendale’s elegantly restored Alex Theatre. Traditionally, animators tend to be a scruffy lot, much like computer wonks, understandable given that animators were, until recently, among the worst paid artists in the Industry. Animation has always been one of the footwear-optional professions, but without the benefit of stock participation.

No longer. Friday’s gala wasn’t exactly wall-to-wall Prada. But the crowd looked spiffy in long black dresses and rented tuxedos, as befits a sector of the Industry that saw its salaries double overnight when Jeffrey Katzenberg walked out of Disney and announced he would make animated features at the new DreamWorks studio. Complete with champagne and catered munchies, the affair was also the first time the Annies had been taped for television (the show will be aired on the Fox Family Channel in December).

Since Disney invented the animated feature with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1937, Disney has been, as this paper has previously pointed out, animation’s 800-pound gorilla. Until animator Don Bluth staged a rebellion within Disney in 1979 and founded his own studio, Disney was feature animation’s only gorilla--you could count the other makers of major animated movies on no hands.

That’s all changed now. Bluth made a string of fairly successful films after fleeing the Mouse, notably “An American Tale,” the story of Fievel, young Jewish-American rodent, executive-produced by Spielberg. Last year, Bluth and Gary Goldman were the producer/directors of “Anastasia,” first feature from Fox Animation Studios. This fall saw the premiere of DreamWorks’ first animated feature, “Antz.” And interest is high in the Glendale-based studio’s forthcoming “The Prince of Egypt,” an animated epic about Moses and Pharaoh, to be released Dec. 18.

At the Annies’ opening reception, most of the Disney people were absent, celebrating, perhaps, the last days of hegemony at a nearby party of their own. This allowed the non-Disney people at the Alex to snipe at will, a tradition perfected at Warner Bros. in the 1930s and ‘40s by the people who laughed maniacally, one assumes, as they created such characters as Daffy Duck, the anti-Donald.

Nothing does more to spur creativity than a great big successful competitor. Which explains why Rob Davies of Toluca Lake is so happy to be at the Annies. Davies moved here from Vancouver 2 1/2 years ago to direct episodes of “Steven Spielberg Presents Pinky & the Brain,” produced by Warner Bros. Television Animation. One of the consistent delights of Saturday morning TV (one of the very few if you believe, as I do, that happiness is never having to watch Saturday morning TV), “Pinky & the Brain” is the continuing saga of a brilliant, deeply disturbed lab mouse who conspires again and again with his profoundly stupid pal Pinky to take over the world. Every week they fail, which is what makes it a series, not a tragedy.

Like Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and the other great Warner Bros. artists, Davies delights in playing David to Disney’s Goliath: “It’s our mice versus their mouse!”

“I don’t think I would have moved down here if it weren’t for ‘Pinky & the Brain,’ ” says Davies, who still gets up Saturday mornings to watch the show. “It retains some of the integrity of the old Warner Bros. cartoons. It hasn’t sold out to marketing. This is animation for animation’s sake.”

Schmoozing with Davies is writer/producer Charlie Howell, nominated for outstanding writing in an animated television production and appropriately decked out in a tux, a tasteful diamond stud in one ear. Asked where he lives, Howell answers: “Warner Bros.” At the awards presentation, he will take home the Annie for an episode of “Pinky & the Brain” called “The Family That Poits Together Narfs Together.”

Poiting nearby (or is he narfing?) is another nominee, Adam Burton, whose cartoon nom de plume is Maxwell Atoms. Atoms has red hair--not red hair like mine, but hair the color of Woody Woodpecker’s topknot. Atoms was nominated in the TV story-boarding category for an episode of “Cow and Chicken.” Currently a storyboard artist for the series “I Am Weasel” (anthropomorphism is to animation what messiahs are to religion), Atoms explains: “The hair changes a lot, but the name changed only once.” (Atoms was bested in the TV story-boarding category by Barry Caldwell, for an episode of “Pinky & the Brain.”)

All in touch with their Inner Rugrats, the thousand members and guests of the International Animated Film Society-Hollywood milling around the entrance to the Alex are not without their heroes. Among the guests is Winsor McKay Jr., great-grandson of the pioneering creator of “Gertie the Dinosaur” who launched the American animated film a decade before young Walt Disney left Kansas City. The society’s lifetime achievement awards bear McKay’s venerated name, and McKay Jr., a fireman, comes down from Sacramento for the Annies whenever he can.

A veteran of 20 years in the animation business, Linda Miller was nominated in the TV story-boarding category for “Bad to the Bone,” an episode of “Disney’s 101 Dalmatians: The Series.”

She was one of the people who walked out of Disney with Don Bluth because she thought he had better, more creative ideas than the Mouse in those days. One of the reasons she ultimately left Bluth was that the culture of his renegade studio made her feel “a little outside the animation community, which I’m a little regretful about now.” One sore point: The Bluth studio de-emphasized awards like the Annies and didn’t help its animators put in the time, money and effort required to prepare entries.

“I ended up leaving Bluth for the same reason I left Disney,” Miller says of her recent return to a revitalized Disney.

“Unfortunately, Don turned out not to be a very good storyteller,” she says. “That was the one piece of the puzzle that was missing and that was the most important piece.”

As to the gala’s big winner, did Disney’s “Mulan” sweep the animated feature categories?

Was Snow White a virgin?