As we approach the end of the year, it is time for a lot of speculation over the Oscars. This year 14 films have been shortlisted, the front-runner being (my personal favourite!) Wall-E, Disney/Pixar’s latest masterpiece, and the others being DreamWorks Animation’s Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa and Kung-Fu Panda, Israel’s award-winning animated documentary – Waltz With Bashir, London-based Framestore Feature Animation’s first film The Tale Of Despereaux, Blue Sky Studio’s Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears A Who!, Disney’s stereoscopic 3-D Bolt, CG Fantasy films – Delgo and Dragon Hunters, stereoscopic 3-D film – Fly Me To The Moon, Igor, Australian stop-motion film $9.99, and the Japanese anime titles The Sky Crawlers and Sword Of The Stranger.
Waltz with Bashir does mix in some live footage towards the end of the film and I hope it doesn’t go down the same path as Alvin and the Chipmunks did last year, getting disqualified later on a small technicality.
Meanwhile, we Indians patiently wait for someone to create an Oscar-worthy animated film. It is interesting to note that the official Indian entry for the Best Foreign Film category – Taare Zameen Par – has animation integrated into its story. In fact, for the very first time clay animation has been used in any Indian mainstream aka Bollywood film. Will be nice to have it in the final 5 nominations – would be a mini-salute for our talented animators – Dhimant and his team, Vaibhav and his team and the team at TATA’s Visual Computing Labs and TATA Elxsi.