38th Annual Annie Award Highlights

Sooooo... I made it to the Annies this year after missing last year. This was my first time going without a press pass so I was just kicking back as a casual observer. DreamWorks Animation's How To Train Your Dragon was the big winner of the evening. Some of the other highlights were:

• Tom Hatten accepting the award for Pixar winning Best Animated Short for Day & Night. Tom Hatten was my animation hero when I was younger, introducing the Popeye cartoons on KTLA, giving some history behind them, taking sketch requests, etc. This was back when local TV heroes were a little more common than they are now
• Knowing ahead of time who the Winsor McCay Award recipients would be for the evening (Brad Bird, Eric Goldberg, and Matt Groening) I was very interested in hearing from all of them and was disappointed to find out Brad Bird wasn't there; well, his hilarious acceptance speech video more than made up for his absence; I hope it can get posted online
• James Hong; It's ridiculous how long his IMDb credits are; I still think of him as Fifth Brother in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing from 1955 and as Wayne's potential future father-in-law in Wayne's World 2; he was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but comes across as though he just moved here from China; I've seen him as a presenter and also as an award-receiver at the Annies a few times and he's always hilarious
• Corey Burton with his spot-on voice characterization of Captain Hook was a real treat
• Talked briefly with Dave Filoni, director of the Star Wars: The Clone Wars series; told him that I was looking forward to seeing the pit droids make an appearance in the series and he said he is hoping to be able to work them in; he also rightly noted that the pit droids are George Lucas' favorite characters from Episode I; one thing I like about Dave's work is that he does a good job (of course with plenty of help from his crew) of stitching together the visual elements of the two Star Wars trilogies
• Oh, and I also bumped into Lisa Williams there; she's the one that made the Christian the Lion video famous on YouTube and got to meet John and Ace; see more about that here

UPDATE: Here's the video of Brad Bird's acceptance speech. This is worth watching the whole thing. There's an unexpected cameo in there somewhere from a very well-known movie star:



The video was originally posted here at Cartoon Brew, so you can go there next and read all the comments.