Disney Win Double At The Oscars!
The 87th Academy Awards was always going to be an interesting year for the animation categories, since The LEGO Movie was snubbed by the Oscars but went on to win the BAFTA for Animated Feature. It sounds incredible but the Academy has only rewarded animated features since 2001, and this year the reliable prediction system of “BAFTA win = Oscar win” for Animated Feature was out of the window for the first time ever. It was Disney – the company that appears to be experiencing yet another renaissance, still basking in the success of Frozen – that took home both the Feature award for Big Hero Six (Dir. Don Hall/Chris Williams, Prod. Roy Conli) and the Animated Short film award for Feast (Dir. Patrick Osborne).
This marks another first for the animation studio, as they have never won for both short and feature in the same year – the closest they had gotten, way back in 1939, was when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was presented with a special Oscar (well, one Oscar and seven little Oscars), the same year that Ferdinand the Bull won Best Animated Short.
Elsewhere the Interstellar team of Paul Franklin, Andrew Lockley, Ian Hunter and Scott Fisher won the Visual Effects award.
To learn more about Disney’s Feast you can read our interview with director Patrick Osborne, designer Jeff Turley and producer Kristina Reed (or listen below in episode 23 of the Skwigly Podcast):