Oscar Shuns CGI Toons

(Hollywood Reporter) – Last year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated three CGI-animated movies for best animated feature, and the pundits proclaimed the death of traditional animation. But those death notices were premature: This year, digital ones and zeros took a back seat to clay, models and hand-drawn characters. The Academy's animation branch ignored such CGI boxoffice heavies as "Madagascar," "Chicken Little" and "Robots" in favor of Hayao Miyazaki's hand-drawn "Howl's Moving Castle," Tim Burton and Mike Johnson's stop-motion "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" and Nick Park and Steve Box's clay-animated "Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit."