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World Animation & VFX Summit Announces 2021 Hall of Fame Honorees
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nimation Magazine has unveiled its list of this year’s distinguished Animation Hall of Fame Game-Changer award recipients. The honorees will receive their awards at The World Animation & VFX Summit Opening Night Party on Sunday, November 7 at The Garland hotel in N. Hollywood, California. This year’s distinguished award recipients are, in alphabetical order:
Gaumont Animation
With offices in Paris, Los Angeles, Berlin and London, Gaumont Animation is one of the top animation studios around the world. The studio, which was first founded in 1997 as Alphanim, Atlan was acquired by entertainment giant Gaumont Film Company in 2008. The company’s animated catalog comprises over 800 half-hours, broadcast in over 130 countries. Currently, the studio’s acclaimed new preschool shows Do, Re & Mi and Stillwater air on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+, respectively. Upcoming projects include SaKalagian murai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles, the much-anticipated adaptation of Stan Sakai’s comic-book series Usagi Yojimbo, and a musical adaptation of Paul McCartney’s novel High in the Clouds. Among Gaumont’s many animation highlights are Bionic Max, Franklin and the Turtle Lake Treasure, Santa’s Apprentice, Mona the Vampire, Redwall, Belle and Sebastian, Furiki Wheels, F Is for Family and RobotBoy. The award will be accepted by Gaumont U.S. president Nicolas Atlan and exec VP of creative content Terry Kalagian.
Tom Kenny
Iconic voice actor Tom Kenny has provided the unmistakable voice for SpongeBob SquarePants since the series premiere in 1999. Kenny also voices the character throughout the SpongeBob feature films and related series Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years and The Patrick Star Show. The prolific voice actor also starred as Dog in CatDog and Heffer in Rocko’s Modern Life and Rocko’s Modern Life: Static Cling. Kenny won the 2018 Emmy Award for Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program and has been the recipient of two Annie Awards for his voice work on SpongeBob SquarePants and Adventure Time (as Ice King). His many voice credits also include Lumpus the Moose on Camp Lazlo! and Eduardo on Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. He has also been a regular cast member on the animated series Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!, My Gym Partner’s a Monkey, Handy Manny, Futurama, Dexter’s Laboratory, Johnny Bravo and The Powerpuff Girls. He also lends his vocal talents to television series including WordGirl, Ultimate Spider-Man, Henry Hugglemonster and Brickelberry. In film, Kenny’s voice can also be heard as Wheelie in Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Revenge of the Fallen, and as Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh.
Phil Lord and Chris Miller
For the past two decades, Phil Lord and Chris Miller have created, directed and produced some of TV and cinema’s most influential animated and live-action comedies. The filmmakLord ing duo are best known for directing and writing the animated films Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie and producing The LEGO Movie 2, as well as directing the live-action comedy film 21 Jump Street and its sequel. Lord and Miller won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature as producers of the Miller blockbuster hit Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which was co-written by Lord. This year, Lord and Miller exec produced Sony Pictures Animation’s highly acclaimed feature The Mitchells vs. The Machines, which premiered on Netflix in April. Unikitty!, Son of Zon, Bless the Harts, America: The Motion Picture and Hoops are some of the other projects they’ve produced over the years. Lord and Miller also created MTV’s popular animated series Clone High and exec produced the features Storks and Smallfoot. Upcoming projects include Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2 and the Clone High revival.
Chris Meledandri
Chris Meledanri is an Oscar- and BAFTA-nominated producer and founder and CEO of Illumination Entertainment, which is best known for producing the blockbuster Despicable Me franchise. During his tenure at Fox, he led the studio’s acquisition of Blue Sky and supervised and exec produced animated features such as Ice Age, Robots, Ice Age: The Meltdown and Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! He also produced the Oscar-nominated shorts Gone Nutty and No Time for Nuts. After founding Illumination in 2008, he produced the global hits Despicable Me (2010) , The Lorax (2012), Despicable Me 2 (2013), Minions (2015), The Secret Life of Pets (2016), Sing (2017), Despicable Me 3 (2017), The Grinch (2018) and The Secret Life of Pets 2 (2019). He also produced the spinoff prequel Minions in 2015. Meledandri was the recipient of the PGA Visionary Award in 2014 and the VES Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. His upcoming slate includes Sing 2, which will be released by Universal this December, Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022) and the untitled Mario movie (2022) as well as Shrek 5 and Despicable Me 4.
www.animationmagazine.net 40
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november 21
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