'Dragons 2' Secures its Oscar-by-Default Position

DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon 2 took home six Annie Awards, including Best Animated Feature and Best Directing for writer-director Dean DeBlois. With the Golden Globe also in hand and the former frontrunner out of the way, it's looking more and more like the beloved franchise will get to bask in Oscar glory.

Speaking of that former frontrunner, Academy snubees Phil Lord and Chris Miller did get a consolation prize for Best Writing, as appropriate a place as any to honour The LEGO Movie's meta comedy stylings.

Among Dragons' remaining Oscar competition, The Boxtrolls won two richly deserved trophies (for its immaculate production design and Ben Kinsgley's inimitable performance), while Big Hero 6 took home only one (albeit a hard-earned one for it cool animated effects).

But Disney can take solace in that fact that their Best Animated Short Oscar contender Feast won its correlative category here. The crowd-pleasing toon is indeed a formidable threat for the Academy Award.

Sadly, GKIDS offerings Song of the Sea and Princess Kaguya were too modest to impress the organization. See all the winners after the cut.

Review - The Boxtrolls

Laika – the Portland-based studio that specializes in a unique hybridization of stop-motion and computer animation – manages to draw ever-growing mountains of praise with every new feature they release, and not without good reason. Though geared primarily towards children, they never coddle their young audience, choosing stories that aren't afraid of being a little scary, a little dark, and even a little morbid. It's also impossible not to marvel at the studio's meticulous hand-made process, which has even become the lynchpin of their marketing identity.

But it begs the question: Even though the stories they tell are great, and the techniques they employ are great, is Laika churning out movies that are great? I'm not so sure they are. Of the three entries in their modest portfolio to date, 2009's Coraline is probably the closest thing to a complete film. Their follow-up, 2012's ParaNorman, exhibited exciting artistic growth but flagged in the story department. And now their latest, The Boxtrolls (directed by Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi), might be their most technically evolved, but overall weakest film yet.

Review - Hugo

A lonely orphan who winds the clocks from within the walls of a Parisian train station attempts to decipher the mystery of a mechanical man in Hugo, Martin Scorsese's courageous foray into 3D family entertainment.

Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), for that is his name, used to love fixing things with his clockmaker father before his untimely death. A rusty old automaton designed to write on paper is all he has to member his dad, and repairing the robot has become a project on which the boy has become dependent. He often pilfers parts from a sad old toymaker, Papa George (Ben Kingsley), who seems somehow connected to the machine, but reluctant to divulge. Hugo finds an ally in the toymaker's goddaughter (Chloe Moretz), an avid reader who yearns for adventure beyond her leather-bound tomes. Together, they attempt to discover the secret concealed within the automaton's intricate clockwork and seek a window into Papa George's past.