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How ‘Earwig and the Witch’ Dragged Studio Ghibli Into the World of CG Animation
TheWrap awards magazine: “We had to create a team and a whole infrastructure from scratch,” says director Goro Miyazaki, son of the company’s legendary founder Hayao Miyazaki By Steve Pond | March 5, 2021 @ 4:09 PM
A version of this story about “Earwig and the Witch” first appeared in the Oscar Nominations Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
The Japanese company Studio Ghibli is legendary for its hand-drawn animation, including the classics “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Princess Mononoke,” “Howl’s Moving Castle” and the Oscar-winning “Spirited Away.” All of those films were directed by the studio’s co-founder, Hayao Miyazaki but it’s his son, Goro Miyazaki, who has now given Studio Ghibli its first-ever 3DCG animated feature, “Earwig and the Witch.”
Two of Glen Keane’s “Over the Moon” sketches:
“Over the Moon,” Keane’s first film for Netflix and also surprisingly his feature directorial debut, starts out in a small town in China, where a young girl named Fei Fei decides to build a rocket to travel to the moon and prove that Chang’e is real. Wary of being a Westerner telling a story from a culture he knew little about, Keane traveled through China with his sketchbook, going into homes in small towns and drawing everything he saw.
“Everything I smelled, I tasted, I heard, I saw, I touched is in this movie,” he said. “There’s this wonderful thing I’ve found in my career, that when you create something from the point of discovery, you are so passionate and you can’t wait to share it.”
How Many Votes Does It Take to Get an Oscar Nomination in 2021?
Here’s the category-by-category breakdown, from a high of 457 to a low of 27Steve Pond | March 4, 2021 @ 1:12 PM Last Updated: March 5, 2021 @ 12:11 PM
AWARDS BEAT
AMPAS
The Academy has made a final count of its members leading into the beginning of Oscar nomination voting on Friday, with 9,300 members eligible to cast ballots for this year’s awards. That’s 62 fewer voters than in the count that was made in December, with the reduction due to some members retiring or moving to the non-voting emeritus classification and others dying.
The number of Oscar voters has still topped 9,000 for the first time since the mid-1940s, when the Academy allowed members of the Hollywood guilds to vote. And the total number of members, which includes non-voting associate members and emeritus members, remains above the 10,000 mark at 10,276.
Independent Spirit Awards Move to Thursday Before the Oscars
The show, usually held the Saturday before the Oscars, will now air in primetime weeknight slot on IFCBrian Welk | January 21, 2021 @ 7:10 AM Last Updated: January 21, 2021 @ 7:32 AM
Mikey Glazer
The Film Independent Spirit Awards are moving up on the release calendar for this year only breaking tradition by not taking place on the Thursday night before the Oscars, the nonprofit group Film Independent announced Thursday.
The 36th Annual Indie Spirits will now be held on the evening of Thursday, April 22 for a primetime broadcast on IFC. They were meant to be held on the afternoon of Saturday, April 24 following a long-standing tradition of coming just one day before the Academy Awards. The show is always a looser experience held during the daytime in a massive tent adjacent to the Santa Monica Pier.