Annie Awards turn into a joke

For those who haven't heard, the 36th Annie Awards, which celebrate the year's best in animated films, have announced their awards. The reason I write about it, is because one of the year's best films, WALL-E was nominated for more awards than had ever been nominated before and it did not win a single award.

Instead freaking Kung-Fu Panda swept the awards. The awards that Panda won over WALL-E include:

Best Animated Feature
Animated Video Game
Animated Effects
Character Animation
Directing
Original Music (WALL-E wasn't even nominated)
Production Design
Storyboarding
Voice Acting, Dustin Hoffman
Writing (again no WALL-E nomination)

Okay, besides looking at what WALL-E didn't win, let's look at what they weren't nominated for. Original Music and Writing, two of the categories that it was nominated for at the Oscars. I need a reason for this to be happening. What are the Annie's thinking? Did they actually see the kid jokes in Kung-Fu Panda and think that it was better than the substance and depth that WALL-E added? How about some other categories? Production design? No way. How could the giant city landscapes and space visuals lose to anything, much less the cartoonish ideas of Kung-Fu Panda? This is a failure of epic proportions. This is the animated equivalent of Shakespeare in Love beating Saving Private Ryan.

I do want to say that this is not meant to downsize the quality of Kung-Fu Panda. It is in no way a bad film, but WALL-E is a genre definer and one of the best, if not the best animated films in history. In 20 years, is anyone going to remember Kung-Fu Panda? I would say no. In 50 years is anyone going to remember WALL-E? I would say yes.