News

Whether or not Rabbi Sfar's cat (voice: François Morel) eats the Rabbi Sfar's parrot is totally up to you to decide. Regardless, that event seems to provide the titular feline with the ability to talk like a human. The cat's speech is much more than just mere parroting though, he can converse fluently with any human (or animal) as long as they are willing to listen to him. Now that the cat is able to speak, he thinks it is due time to celebrate his bar mitzvah. Why? Because the cat wants the reluctant Rabbi Sfar (voice: Maurice Bénichou) to allow him to snuggle up with his beautiful daughter, Zlabya (voice: Hafsia Herzi) -- whom the cat considers to be his mistress. Of course that is not a convincing enough reason for Rabbi Sfar, especially considering the cat's rapid fire criticisms of Judaism. Being that Antoine Delesvaux and Joann Sfar...

I really don't put much stock in the International Animated Film Society's 2013 Annie Awards, which is why I didn't rush to report on their results on Saturday. One year Disney and Pixar boycott the event, feeling there was an unfair advantage paid to larger contributing sponsors, DreamWorks being the primary example. So with such a nasty stench over the event what good does it do to pay it much mind? That said, I'll be brief in mentioning Wreck-It Ralph topped Saturday night's winners with five awards, including Best Animated Picture. The awards have something like a 75% streak when it comes to helping predict the eventual Oscar winner for Best Animated Feature and as the days have gone on, it's looking more and more like Ralph will be this year's winner (see my predictions here). Pixar's Brave, Laika's ParaNorman and DreamWorks' Rise of the Guardians each took home two awards in lesser,...

Disney's "Wreck-It-Ralph" was the big winner at the 40th Annie Awards held Saturday taking home the Best Animated Feature award. It is now officially the Oscar frontrunner in the Best Animated Film category.

Here's the complete list of winners/nominees; for winners/nominees of other award-giving bodies this season, click here:

Animated Feature

"Brave" . Pixar Animation Studios

"Frankenweenie" . Walt Disney Studios

"Hotel Transylvania" . Sony Pictures Animation

"ParaNorman" . Focus Features

"Rise of the Guardians" . DreamWorks Animation

"The Pirates! Band of Misfits" . Aardman Animations

"The Rabbi.s Cat ". Gkids

Winner "Wreck-It Ralph" . Walt Disney Animation Studios

Animated Special Production

"Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1" . Warner Bros. Animation

"Before Orel" . Trust . Starburns Industries, Inc.

Winner "Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem" . Illumination Entertainment

"Disney Tron: Uprising . Beck.s Beginning" . Disney TV Animation

"Dragons: Gift of the Night Fury" . DreamWorks Animation

"Justice League: Doom" . Warner Bros. Animation

Animated Short Subject

"Brad and Gary" . Illumination...

I love the art of animation, and it's amazing to see how far things have come and advanced over the years. The industry is changing in terms of technology, but what it all really comes down to is telling good stories. There's been a lot of great animated movies this year, and many of them are up for several awards at the 40th Annual Annie Awards.

Some of the movies nomainated include Brave, Frankenweenie, Hotel Transylvania, ParaNorman, Rise of the Guardians, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, and Wreck-It Ralph. Out of those films my favorite is a toss up between Wreck-It Ralph and ParaNorman, those were two pretty incredible films. I think ParaNorman has the edge though.

Some of the other animated properties nominated are Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1, Disney Tron: Uprising, Justice League: Doom, Robot Chicken ‘DC Comics Special', South Park ‘Raising the Bar’, and several others.

The International Animated Film Society (Asifa-Hollywood) has announced the nominees for the 40th Annie Awards also known as Animation's Highest Honor. Disney/Pixar led the nominees with "Brave," "Frankenweenie," and "Wreck-It-Ralph" getting Best Picture nods. The 40th Annual Annie Awards will take place on February 2, 2013 at UCLA.s Royce Hall, in Los Angeles, California.

And the nominees for the 40th Annual Annie Awards are:

Best Picture nominees:

Brave - Disney/Pixar)

Frankenweenie -The Walt Disney Studios

Hotel Transylvania - Sony Pictures Animation

ParaNorman - Focus Features

Rise of the Guardians - DreamWorks Animation

The Pirates! Band of Misfits - Aardman Animations

The Rabbi.s Cat - Gkids

Wreck-It Ralph - Walt Disney Animation Studios

Annie Award for Best Animated Special Production

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 . Warner Bros. Animation

Best General Audience Animated Television Production

Archer .Space Race, Part 1. . Weissman Markovitz Communications for FX

Bob.S Burgers .Earsy Rider...

Which of 2012′s animated films drew the most applause? According to the International Animated Film Society, Asifa-Hollywood, the options include Pixar’s Brave, Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, and DreamWorks’s Rise of the Guardians. All three — among others — were nominated for animation’s highest honor today when the group named the contenders for its 40th annual Annie Awards. The prizes will be distributed Saturday, Feb. 2 in Los Angeles.

See who else made the cartoon cut with this list of nominees for the Annie Awards’ biggest honors. A full list of nominees can be found at the awards’ website.

Best Animated...

Disney withdrew from the International Animated Film Society, Asifa-Hollywood back in 2010 and even before then it was hard to put much stock in the Annie Awards. Now it's just sort of a blip on the overall award season radar that manages headlines twice a year, once for their nominees and again for their winners, which this year will be announced on Saturday, February 2, 2013. That said, the org announced their 2013 nominees this morning and their Best Feature Film list was made up of eight nominees (a large list considering the lack of quality animated films I've seen this year) including Brave, Frankenweenie, Hotel Transylvania, ParaNorman, Rise of the Guardians, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, The Rabbi's Cat and Wreck-It Ralph. It is nice not to see something like The Lorax among that list, but I still think this was a year in which the field could have easily been limited to five nominees.

The animation distributor Gkids, an unexpected heavyweight in last year's Oscar animation race, is qualifying four different films for the Oscars this year. By doing so, they've pushed the animation field over the number required for a full slate of five nominees. Gkids announced on Tuesday that it plans to give Oscar-qualifying runs to Remi Bezancon and Jean-Christophe Lie's "Zarafa," a French hit about the giraffe given to Charles X of France by the Pasha of Eqypt; Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux's "The Rabbi's Cat," a French film set in the 1930s...

"It doesn't take long at all for the personal and the political to merge seamlessly in 5 Broken Cameras, an immediately involving and moving portrait of the Palestinian troubles through the eyes of one of the film's co-directors, Emad Burnat," begins Chris Cabin in Slant. "A lifelong resident of the small village of Bil'in, Burnat quickly went from being a man of the soil to a man with a movie camera in 2005, just as his fourth son, Gibreel, was born in his small West Bank village and has continued to film the struggles of his village against the settlers — a word used to refer to nearly all Israeli private citizens who occupy disputed territory. Spanning from the birth of Gibreel to the end of 2010, 5 Broken Cameras is made up almost entirely of footage shot by Mr Burnat, which was then edited by Guy Davidi, an Israeli filmmaker and film professor who's...

The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art have announced that they'll be presenting 29 features and 12 shorts in the 41st edition of New Directors/New Films, running March 21 through April 1). The series, dedicated to "the discovery of new works by emerging and dynamic filmmaking talent," opens with Nadine Labaki's Where Do We Go Now? (see the Cannes roundup). A few notes on the other features:

The Ambassador (Mads Brügger). The La Weekly's Karina Longworth suggests that Brügger is "sort of the Vice magazine version of Sacha Baron Cohen, as financed by Lars von Trier. His last film was The Red Chapel, an exercise in hidden camera comedy with unusual socio-political stakes, which I put on my top 10 list for 2010." In "his hilarious, troubling new film," Brügger poses as "a diplomat in Africa, a decadent Westerner plundering a third-world nation…. For a six-figure outlay, Brugger is promised a Liberian passport,...

Bérénice Bejo as Peppy Miller in Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius, A Separation: César Winners Pt.1 Best Actor Sami Bouajila, Omar m'a tuer / Omar Killed Me François Cluzet, Intouchables / Untouchable Jean Dujardin, The Artist Olivier Gourmet, L'exercice de l'État / The Minister Denis Podalydes, La conquête / The Conquest * Omar Sy, Intouchables / Untouchable Philippe Torreton, Présumé coupable / Guilty Best Actress Ariane Asquaride, Les neiges du Kilimanjaro / The Snows of Kilimanjaro * Bérénice Bejo, The Artist Leila Bekhti, La Source des femmes / The Source Valérie Donzelli, La guerre est déclarée / Declaration of War Marina Foïs, Polisse Marie Gilain, Toutes nos envies / All Our Desires Karin Viard, Polisse Best Supporting Actor * Michel Blanc, L'exercice de l'État / The Minister Nicolas Duvauchelle, Polisse Joey Starr, Polisse Bernard Lecoq, La conquête / The Conquest Frédéric Pierrot, Polisse Best Supporting Actress Zabou Breitman, L'exercice de l'État / The Minister Anne Le Ny, Intouchables / Untouchable Noémie Lvovsky, L'Apollonide,...

Bérénice Bejo, Malcolm McDowell, The Artist The Artist, Polisse, Intouchables: César Nominations Pt.1 Best Actor Sami Bouajila, Omar m'a tuer / Omar Killed Me François Cluzet, Intouchables / Untouchable Jean Dujardin, The Artist Olivier Gourmet, L'exercice de l'État / The Minister Denis Podalydes, La conquête / The Conquest Omar Sy, Intouchables / Untouchable Philippe Torreton, Présumé coupable / Guilty Best Actress Ariane Asquaride, Les neiges du Kilimanjaro / The Snows of Kilimanjaro Bérénice Bejo, The Artist Leila Bekhti, La Source des femmes / The Source Valérie Donzelli, La guerre est déclarée / Declaration of War Marina Foïs, Polisse Marie Gilain, Toutes nos envies / All Our Desires Karin Viard, Polisse Best Supporting Actor Michel Blanc, L'exercice de l'État / The Minister Nicolas Duvauchelle, Polisse Joey Starr, Polisse Bernard Lecoq, La conquête / The Conquest Frédéric Pierrot, Polisse Best Supporting Actress Zabou Breitman, L'exercice de l'État / The Minister Anne Le Ny, Intouchables / Untouchable Noémie Lvovsky, L'Apollonide, souvenirs de la maison close / House of Tolerance Carmen Maura,...

The live stream of the European Film Awards from Berlin this evening was pretty spotty, but a few fine moments came through, particularly the moment when a special honorary award was inaugurated and presented to a very surprised Michel Piccoli by Volker Schlöndorff and Bruno Ganz.

Another special award was given to producer Mariela Besuievski, Stellan Skarsgård presented the European Achievement in World Cinema Award to Mads Mikkelsen, and Stephen Frears received this year's Lifetime Achievement Award.

The full list of winners and nominees:

European Film 2011: Melancholia, Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany

Written and Directed by Lars von Trier

Produced by Meta Louise Foldager and Louise Vesth.

Also nominated:

The Artist, France

Written and Directed by Michel Hazanavicius

Produced by Thomas Langmann and Emmanuel Montamat

Le Gamin au Velo (The Kid with a Bike), Belgium/France/Italy

Written and Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Produced by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne,...

Melancholia, The Artist, Le Havre and the other nominations for the 2011 European Film Awards have been announced. The 24th Annual European Film Awards are presented “by the European Film Academy to recognize excellence in European cinematic achievements. The awards are given in over ten categories of which the most important is the Film of the year. They are restricted to European cinema and European producers, directors, and actors.” This year’s European Film Awards “ceremony will be held on December 3, 2011 in Berlin’s Tempodrom near Potsdamer Platz.”

The full listing of the 2011 European Film Awards nominations is below.

European Film 2011

The Artist, France

Written and Directed by: Michel Hazanavicius; Produced by: Thomas Langmann & Emmanuel Montamat

Le Gamin au Velo (The Kid with a Bike), Belgium/France/Italy

Written and Directed by: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne; Produced by: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Denis Freyd & Andrea Occhipinti

Hævnen (In a Better World), Denmark...

The European Film Academy has announced the three nominees for the 2011 Animated Feature Film category. The nominees are: Antoine Delesvaux and Joann Sfar's "Le Chat Du Rabbin" ("The Rabbi's Cat"); Tono Errando, Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba's "Chico & Rita;" and Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol's "Une Vie de Chat" ("A Cat in Paris"). The Awards ceremony will take place in Berlin on December 3. Full announcement below: A ...

"A little bit of phantasmagoria and a lot more 'And-then-he-fucked…' grungy glamour, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is at its best when its mythologizing is carnal and infused with cabaret, and not making the inflated claim of its title." Bill Weber in Slant: "Writer-director Joann Sfar, a comic artist adapting his own graphic novel's version of the life of French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, generally eschews staples of the musician biopic like stage-performance recreations and studio-session drama. His focus is first on the artist as a boy in Nazi-occupied Paris, born Lucien Ginsburg (Kacey Mottet Klein), wearing a yellow 'Juif' star with poise and already cultivating his interests in art and women, and then how he fashioned himself into the roguish seducer personified in the 1960s hit-making persona of salacious Serge (Eric Elmosnino, a near-lookalike with the requisite lascivious panache and curled lip)."

Sylviane Gold opens her New York Times piece on the film,...

Something of a national treasure in his native France, Joann Sfar (The Rabbi’s Cat) is the award–winning author of graphic novels, comics, and children’s books, including the New York Times bestseller Little Vampire Goes to School and a fresh re-imagining of Saint-Exupéry’s classic Le Petit Prince. Sfar was a serious student of philosophy at the University of Nice despite his strict religious upbringing (his mother is Ashkenazi and his father Sephardic), but decided to chase his youthful dream of publishing comics. He studied under painter Jean-François Debord at the School of Fine Arts in Paris (Aderf) and eventually became one of the rising young stars of an underground comics movement that included Lewis Trondheim and Christophe Blain. Recently, Sfar has immersed himself in the world of filmmaking, transforming his whimsical comics (think Marc Chagall meets Will Eisner) into equally fanciful, story-based films. Earlier this year in France,...

Joann Sfar's popular graphic novels about a rabbi and his talking cat - published in seventeen languages around the world - come to the big screen in June thanks to an animated feature film directed by Sfar himself in cooperation with Antoine Delesvaux.Algiers, 1920s. Rabbi Sfar has more than one problem. His beautiful daughter is becoming a teenager and above all, his parrot-killing cat has just started talking!The delivery of a box from Russia further complicates things when a painter is discovered inside, more dead than alive. He is on a quest for a hidden tribe and its mythical city in Africa. Convinced that the city exists, he sets off on an incredible adventure, taking with him the Rabbi, his cat, a wise old...

Joann Sfar's popular graphic novels about a rabbi and his talking cat - published in seventeen languages around the world - come to the big screen in June thanks to an animated feature film directed by Sfar himself in cooperation with Antoine Delesvaux.Algiers, 1920s. Rabbi Sfar has more than one problem. His beautiful daughter is becoming a teenager and above all, his parrot-killing cat has just started talking!The delivery of a box from Russia further complicates things when a painter is discovered inside, more dead than alive. He is on a quest for a hidden tribe and its mythical city in Africa. Convinced that the city exists, he sets off on an incredible adventure, taking with him the Rabbi, his cat, a wise old...

Rumours are circulating in Paris two weeks ahead of the press conference at which the official selection for the 63rd Cannes Film Festival (May 12-23, 2010) will be unveiled. And uncertainty will reign until April 15 for this year many films are apparently caught up in a race against time to be ready for Cannes.

According to our sources, the race for the Palme d’Or will almost certainly include Tree of Life by Us director Terrence Malick; Biutiful by Mexico’s Alejandro González Inárritu; Tamara Drewe by UK director Stephen Frears; Another Year by fellow Brit Mike Leigh; and two Korean films: Poetry by Lee Chang-dong and The Housemaid by Im Sang-soo.

The competition line-up may also include Us director Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, Miral by fellow Us filmmaker Julian Schnabel, Outrage by Japan’s Takeshi Kitano, and two Argentinean features: Pablo Trapero’s Carancho and Diego Lerman’s Moral Sciences.