In answer to your questions: Disney/Pixar's Up is ineligible for the Writers Guild awards because the animation studios are not signatory members of the union. (Kinda bites them in the ass at awards time, eh?) Up is technically eligible for the Directors Guild and Screen Actors Guild awards. "But it'll be a cold day in hell before the directors or actors nominate an animated film," one source tells me. Some years the DGA didn't even include animated movies on the "reminders" list to members.
'Up' Not Down With H'wood Guild Awards
By Nikki Finke | Category: Awards | Wednesday January 6, 2010 @ 6:01pm PST
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Well, there is an Animation Caucus in the WGA, and if you write the filthy kidvid and not for the handful of signatories, you can join that. Gets you a limited membership. Can’t vote, don’t get the medical, but you do get a WGA card and the house organ. Card will get you into screenings …
Funny thing is “Up” is the best written script of last year .
“(Kinda bites them in the ass at awards time, eh?)”
You know a good method for making that award season the ass-biting feeling go away? NOT pay 2.5% of your non-theatrical GROSS to the writer of the movie you financed for $200m.
Do you really think Pixar gives a shit about this? “Up” doesn’t need the guild awards. Let the movies that could use the nods as PR to boost their struggling box office have them. They don’t really matter in long-run, anyway.
On a semi-related note – if you haven’t seen “Hurt Locker”, GO SEE IT.
Technically, yes, it is ineligible for a WGA award.
The bigger point you are missing is that it is creatively ineligible as well, as it is ‘written’ by more than just writers. Like most animation. And like all good animation.
And Pixar should be applauded for the collaborative creative process that they inspire. You don’t need awards ceremonies to do that. Just a good team that isn’t spliced into various labor pools like spectators in Times Square for New Years Eve.
I beg to differ. Live-action writers produce a script, which is then turned into a movie by a plethora of others, producers, directors, set designers, actors, editors, camera, sound, music, grips — the list goes on.
Those folks are necessary, of course, but they don’t get writing credit unless they put it on the page.
Animation is the same, but with a different cast — you get storyboard artists, animators, voice actors and their directors, producers, and they don’t get a writing credit unless they, you know, write something.
Lot of creative folks involved in both LA and animation. However, drawing a storyboard is not writing. Neither is anything else. Period.
Animation is entirely different, which is why so many writers fail at it.
LA is filled with far more people who type and perform like monkeys in pitch meetings than authors who actually write. Writers write books. Remember those?
Get off your collective bargaining island and take a look around. You might learn something.
Um … Writers write all kinds of things other than books, and the biggest difference between animation and live-action is that you write a director’s script, because in kidvid, most of the time there isn’t a director per se. And it has to move along, so you don’t get to offer much in the way of scenery-chewing soliloquy. Like a comic book that moves, you tell the story in pictures.
Not to gauchely wave credits, but I have some experience in these arenas. Writing is writing. Some folks cannot adjust to the various forms. Many can. Go back and look at the credits for, say, Batman: The Animated Show, which did collect a couple of Emmy™ nods and picked up one, and look at the number of writers there who also wrote books.
You can tell a story or you can’t. If you can, you can learn the forms.
Sorry but Up was all over-hype. I mean, talking dogs..sure for as 5 years old!!
The 2009 feature film list from the DGA for voting for the DGA award does not include Up nor Princess and the Frog, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs…no animated films. Are animated films ineligible for the DGA award?
Isn’t just working on a PIXAR project reward enough? Yes. Yes it is.
While Awards Season brings a lot of prestige to a project, it also triples the cost of the P&A a distributor puts into a film and diminishes the likelihood a profit participant will see any backend profits before 20 years. Better to have a moderately successful film without any shot at an award than a wildly successful film for which a studio needs to orchestrate an Oscar campaign over the course of three months.
Sense of Accomplishment > Awards
Side note: I’m sure Bob Peterson and Pete Docter are crying themselves to sleep on their beds stuffed full of money.
as a writer who has been up for studio feature animation jobs, i can tell you that they aren’t wga for many reasons… but one reason is that it takes a long time to write/create/produce an animated feature and when it’s all said and done, the writer is getting paid about $7.00 an hour.
Ed Asner deserves a SAG nomination for his brilliant work in UP. One of the best performances of the year.
What do CITIZEN KANE, STAR WARS, 2001, THE WIZARD OF OZ, BLADE RUNNER, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, SUNSET BLVD., PSYCHO, JAWS, VERTIGO, E.T., APOCALYPSE NOW, HIGH NOON, TAXI DRIVER, GOODFELLAS, SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, STAGECOACH, PULP FICTION, WALL*E, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, THE EXORCIST, THE WILD BUNCH, THE DARK KNIGHT and most great movies have in common? None of them won Best Picture. In the long run, no one remembers awards – we remember great films.
Why does anyone care if “Up” gets a WGA nod. If anything, Pixar only cares about Oscars, and it’s films have been nominated in the Original Screenplay category regularly for the past decade. They never win, but they still get nominated, despite not getting the guild nod.
Do they ever have a chance of winning that Oscar, though? If “Ratatouille” couldn’t win it, I don’t know.