Top Ten: Pixar Films

I've never committed to a definitive ranking of the films of Pixar Animation. Perhaps having relatively few feature titles under their banner made a top ten list kinda meaningless (although their ever growing roster of memorable characters is always ripe for sorting). Or perhaps the frequently high caliber of their movies made ranking them a more arbitrary exercise than ranking movies already is.

But with raves for their fifteenth feature Inside Out announcing a return to form after a few years of middling success, now seems like a good time to go on record as to which gems sparkle the brightest for me personally. Needless to say, this list is in constant flux and subject to positional shifts at any time – Probably as soon as I see Inside Out!

But which of the studio's first fourteen is on the bubble?...

My Award nominations: Animated Feature

Somebody didn't want to open until ONE week before the Oscars, so I had to hold off on this category. But now that I've seen all the contenders, precious few as they are, I can finally publish my picks for Best Animated Feature of 2013.

Frozen leads Annie Award winners

Frozen won five ANNIE Awards tonight including Best Animated Feature, further solidifying its stranglehold on the Oscar. But as the ANNIEs have been more prone to doing in recent years since adjusting their voting system, the wealth was spread out a bit. Monsters University won a pair and The Croods won three. Even The Wind Rises surprisingly popped up as the winner for Best Writing.

Over in the Short Subjects category, Oscar frontrunner Get a Horse won the day, so make of that what you will. Seems like as decent an Oscar prediction as any.

Check out the feature film winners after the cut.

Annie nominations kick off a crowded December

It must be December, because lists of nominations, top tens, and critics' superlatives are officially upon us. Today, ASIFA-Hollywood dropped their bloated slate of nominees for the 41st Annie Awards, and the Golden Satellite nominations were announced. If those two groups don't quite have you titillated (neither of them move the needle much in terms of influence on the awards race), then look forward to the coming days when we can expect announcements from the New York critics, LA critics, and the National Board of Review.

But back to the Annies...

In the feature film categories, Monsters University and the likely Oscar frontrunner Frozen lead the way with ten nominations. Following with nine are The Croods and Despicable Me 2 (no, I'm not inclined to count the latter's short film Puppy or its nominated TV commercial towards its total).

Speaking of shorts, the only ones to pop up both here and on the Academy's shortlist are Disney's Get A Horse! (the presumed frontrunner), the NFB's Gloria Victoria (a fringe contender if ever there was one), and the BBC's Room on the Broom (from the makers of the 2011 nominated short The Gruffalo). So make of that what you will.

Best Animated Feature

• A Letter to Momo - 
GKIDS
• Despicable Me 2 - 
Universal Pictures
• Ernest & Celestine
 - GKIDS
• Frozen - 
Walt Disney Animation Studios
• Monsters University - 
Pixar Animation Studios
• The Croods
 - DreamWorks Animation
• The Wind Rises
 - The Walt Disney Studios

Review - Monsters University

End of June. School's out, but many newly-freed students (and their parents) will be quick to reenter the academic world this summer at the movies via Disney/Pixar's Monsters University, a college-based prequel to their beloved 2001 feature Monsters, Inc.

Those familiar with the original won't need much of a refresher course to recall the clever premise behind Pixar's Monsters universe. The monsters rely on the screams of children as their primary energy source, and where do monsters go to learn how to scare the tots? Why, Monsters University of course – or possibly rival school M Tech, but that's a moot point.