The nominees and winners of the 33rd annual Annie Awards, honoring achievements in the animation field, have been announced. Among the categories in this year's awards are a few related to video games, including Best Animated Video Game.
Though nearly all video games are, technically speaking, animated, the nominees for the category focus on more stylized art styles rather than realistic, motion-captured games.
The category winner in this new Annie Awards prize was Treyarch and Activision's cel-shaded console comic-book license
Ultimate Spider-Man, which won out against others in the field, including Double Fine's
Psychonauts,
SpongeBob SquarePants: Lights, Camera, PANTS! and
Tak: The Great Juju Challenge, both from THQ.
The exception to the 'stylized' rule among the 'Best Animated Video Game' award nominees this year was Capcom's
Resident Evil 4, which, though not "realistic" in the sense that it centers around hideous mutants and over-the-top acrobatics, does feature relatively lifelike characters and animation compared to the other animated titles.
Elsewhere in the popular animation awards, overall winner of Best Animated Feature and too many other categories to list was Aardman Animation's
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the studio's second feature film. Though not mentioned among the award winners, the Aardman movie had a tie-in video game released for multiple platforms by Blitz Games, and quite a few of its competitors for the Best Animated Feature prize also saw game adaptations, including
Madagascar and
Chicken Little.
