A few days ago, Jimmy McMillan, who is running for NY Govenor by way of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party, delivered a speech you won’t soon forget. Today, it’s been paired with Pixar’s UP. Brilliant!

Surprising almost noone, Up took home the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film last night. In this clip below, director Pete Docter offers advice on how to get your own Oscar – “draw, draw, draw.” He also touches on the collaborative nature of his fellow Pixar directors like John Lasseter and Brad Bird. Big congrats to the whole team at Pixar, and to François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain, the three directors of Logorama, which won the Best Animated Short prize.

Back in November, the Lineboil audience was nearly perfect in selecting the Oscar nominations, getting 4 or 5 correct. For Best Animated Feature Film, you chose Ponyo, as opposed to Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s stop-motion feature, which ended up snagging the nomination instead. Up stands out from the bunch, taking a total of 5 nominations, including Original Screenplay and a Best Picture nod. It’s only the second time an animated feature has been mentioned amongst the live-action films in this category (Beuaty and the Beast). Not to diminish this achievement, but BATB did it when only 5 films were nominated, while this year its 10. That said, I’d argue that if there were still 5 slots, Up would likely be amongst them. After all, it was the best-reviewed widely-released film of 2009, animated or not.

The other interesting development here is that a pair of 2D features (The Princess and the Frog and The Secret of Kells) were included. Only Persepolis (2007) and Howl’s Moving Castle (2005) had cracked this category in the past 5 years, while the onslaught of CG features basked in the limelight. Kells pulled off perhaps the biggest win by getting a nomination, as the film had such a small release in the US.

Here’s the nominations (5 this year, while previous years there were only 3):

• Coraline (Focus Features), Henry Selick
• Fantastic Mr. Fox (20th Century Fox), Wes Anderson
• The Princess and the Frog (Walt Disney), John Musker and Ron Clements
• The Secret of Kells (GKIDS), Tomm Moore
• Up (Disney/Pixar), Pete Docter

 
Congrats to all of the teams involved!

Tonight Pixar’s Up took the top prize at the 2010 Golden Globe Awards. Paul McCartney presented and quiped that “animation is not just for children, it also for adults who take drugs.” For a moment, I thought he was going to say something insightful, but he went for the easy gag. He also noted that Yellow Submarine is planned for a big-screen revival, at the hands of motion-capture hack Robert Zemeckis. I suppose thanks to Rock Band, people are used to floaty, tasteless Beatles animation.

Enough sour grapes – huge congrats to Pete Docter and the whole team at Pixar. Next up, the Oscar!

Australian musician Nick Bertke (aka Pogo) produces music entirely from film audio, creating entirely new works. You may remember his take on Alice in Wonderland – simply hypnotic. Upular is his latest, which borrows samples from Disney/Pixar’s Up.

Today we’ve been treated to a new animated short from Disney/Pixar. Hearing that, you’d assume it’s a CG-animated film, but instead it’s a short 2D film from the world of Up, and in fact, it’s not really animated much at all. George and AJ was first released as an extra alongside the iTunes release of the film and it looks as though it was based on artwork produced for a Golden Book. It was written and directed by Pixar story artist Josh Cooley (storyboarded on Up), an animated in After Effects by Catherine Kelly. Even without Pixar’s typical animated wizardry, Ed Asner’s voice or even lip-sync – it’s still quite entertaining, no?

While Disney/Pixar’s Up is still in theaters around the world (it’s the #1 movie in the UK and Ireland right now), the CG film released on DVD and Blu-Ray today here in the US. Here’s behind-the-scenes vignette that looks at the voice of the young Wilderness Explorer, Russell.