Oscar-nominated animated short Dear Basketball won the Annie for animated short; Coco Full Movie Online Oscar-nominated animated short Revolting Rhymes nabbed an Annie for animated special production; and Weta’s work on VFX Oscar nominee War for the Planet of the Apes collected the Annie for best character animation in a live-action production.
The TV category winners represented multiple productions, led by Disney Mickey Mouse and Samurai Jack, which took home three trophies apiece.
Winsor McCay Awards for career contributions were presented to James Baxter, Stephen Hillenburg and Canadian animation duo Wendy Tilby & Amanda Forbis.
SpongeBob Squarepants creator HIllenburg, who was diagnosed with ALS this past year, was seated and received a standing ovation. Tom Kenny, who is the voice actor for SpongeBob, made the stage presentation and accepted the award.
The Ub Iwerks Award for technical advancement went to TVPaint; a special achievement award was presented to Studio MDHR Entertainment for its 1930s-inspired video game Cuphead; and the June Foray Award for charitable impact was given to animation historian Didier Ghez.
This year, the International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood, dedicated its Annies ceremony to veteran voice actress June Foray, who died in July at the age of 99.
A complete list of award winners follows.Salvador Meza has been making guitars since he was a boy, but his leathery hands have never had to churn them out as fast as now — thanks to the hit movie “Coco.”
Meza, 41, is one of many renowned guitar-makers in the Mexican town of Paracho, which has been producing artfully crafted guitars since the 18th century.
But the sleepy colonial town has never seen a boom like this — all because of “Coco,” this year’s Golden Globe winner for best animated film and a box office smash that has grossed more than US$500 million so far.Set in Mexico, the movie tells the story of Miguel, a young boy who secretly longs to be a musician but is growing up in a family where music is forbidden.
Fate thrusts into his hands Thor Ragnarok Full movie Online a white guitar incrusted with mother-of-pearl, topped with gold tuning pegs and a stylized black skull.
The skull, like the film itself, is a playful tribute to Mexico’s Day of the Dead, a festival of colorful costumes, decorations and sweets during which, according to tradition, the dead come back to visit the living.
Director Lee Unkrich has called the film a “love letter to Mexico,” and Mexico loves it back: it is the country’s highest-grossing movie of all time.
The animators at Pixar, the studio behind the film, based Miguel’s guitar on a real-life version made by an artisan from Paracho — and demand for replicas now has the town’s luthiers working in overdrive.
“I usually work out of my home with my wife and a friend. But now, I’ve had to call up my godmother, my nephew, my cousin,” said Meza through the cloud of sawdust in his workshop.
“We’re all going crazy over ‘Coco!'”
Since “Coco” had its world premiere in Mexico on October 20, Meza says he has been sleeping three hours a night and has doubled his output from 50 guitars a week to 100.
Paracho, the “guitar capital of Mexico,” makes nearly one million classical guitars a year, many exported to the United States.
Typically, they are elegant and understated masterpieces of burnished brown wood.
At least, that was the case until the town caught what guitar shop owner Maria Eugenia Gomez calls “Coco fever.”Now, she says, she can’t keep up with demand for the flashy white guitars.
“If I had 1,000 of them, I’d sell them all,” said Gomez, 76.
‘Straight out of a movie’
The man behind the original “Coco” guitar is German Vazquez, a Paracho native who emigrated to the United States 25 years ago, slipping over the border to chase the American dream.
The state where Paracho is located, Michoacan, was until recent years swept by grisly violence unleashed by the Knights Templar drug cartel. It is among the states with the highest rates of emigration to the US.
After Vazquez crossed the border, he found work, eventually became a US citizen and finally managed to open his own guitar workshop in Los Angeles — which is where Pixar found him.
Now 64, he reminisces with a hint of nostalgia about his trek across the desert a quarter-century ago.
“It was hard. You arrive with nothing but the clothes on your back, with no money, nothing but your desire to work,” said Vazquez, a critic of US President Donald Trump’s planned border wall.
He said he sees a little bit of young Miguel in his own life’s story.
“He wants to be a musician, and he searches for a way to make it happen. He fights and fights until he achieves it. I think in that way I’m also like little Miguel… in love with guitars,” he told AFP.
“My life is straight out of a movie.”The hit Pixar film added to its early awards season haul, taking the best animated feature trophy at tonight’s Golden Globes. The win follows best animated film honors from the National Board of Review and New York Film Critics Circle. Coco also was nominated in the Globes’ song category for Robert Lopez’s “Remember Me.”
Pixar’s Coco takes place during the Mexican holiday Dia de Los Muertos. Directed by Unkrich and Adrian Molina,Watch Daddy’s Home 2 Full movie follows a young boy, Miguel, who wishes to be a star-studded crooner of standards, just like his grandfather, the legendary singer Ernesto de la Cruz. However, music is of the devil in Miguel’s family, and de la Cruz is largely to blame for the curse. In order to make generational events correct, Miguel finds himself on the other side of life with relatives he’s only heard stories about.
Other nominees in the best animated feature category were The Boss Baby, The Breadwinner, Ferdinand and Loving Vincent.Thor: Ragnarok has quickly spread across torrent sites after customers were able to prematurely download the title an entire month before its planned mid-February digital release. The error is apparently the result of a miscommunication between Vudu and Apple.
Both companies participate in the Movies Anywhere program, which lets consumers watch their digital movie libraries across devices and various apps such as iTunes, Vudu, Amazon Video, Google Play Movies, and others. It’s a fantastic idea that basically bulldozes any kind of ecosystem lock-in — at least when it comes to movies.
some users on Reddit noticed that when placing a preorder for the well-received Thor: Ragnarok with Vudu, the movie showed up as immediately available on iTunes. Somewhere along the line, Vudu and iTunes mixed up the handshake on the release date, and iTunes seemed to think that customers had rights to watch the film right away instead of waiting another month.
The movie could be streamed as well as downloaded in full for offline viewing. And as you might guess, it took very little time for a flawless, 720p version of the digital release to find its way onto the internet. Once iTunes’ DRM protections were stripped away and it was shared, the movie spread like wildfire. Higher resolutions (including 1080p) may also be out there.If the rumored explanation is true, this would mark the first major failure of Movies Anywhere, and Disney is probably none too pleased about the situation. Thor: Ragnarok wasn’t scheduled to release on iTunes until February 20th. Now, Marvel and Disney might consider pushing up that launch to avoid losing rentals and purchases to a month’s worth of piracy.
Is it normal for an entire copy of a film to sit on iTunes servers this far in advance of release? Where was the breakdown between Apple and Vudu? The Verge has reached out to Apple, Vudu, Movies Anywhere, and Disney for clarification and further comment.When perfect copies of movies leak out onto the Internet in advance of their official release dates, there’s usually an element of skullduggery at play.
This can sometimes involve people intercepting, stealing, or borrowing DVD screener discs, for example. However, other problems can unexpectedly raise their heads.
Case in point – the pre-release leak of Marvel’s Thor Ragnarok this past weekend.
With a disc release planned for February 26th just four months after the superhero movie’s theatrical debut, digital distribution on iTunes was set to go ahead on February 19th.
However, due to what appears to be a significant blunder at Apple, the $180 million movie is now being furiously pirated all over the Internet. A small sample of the latest leak (all releases with an upload date of ‘today’) can be seen in the screenshot below, sourced from The Pirate Bay.
Marvel’s Thor Ragnarok was due it be released digitally on February 19th. However, some kind of blunder at Apple means that people using MoviesAnywhere and Vudu were offered it for immediate download via iTunes Black Panther Full movie Online Free. Copies are now all over the Internet and getting pirated at a furious rate.