Although dialogue isn’t always necessary in motion pictures, some form of sound tends to be essential in moving those stories along.
Each year, the Golden Reel Awards (presented by the Motion Picture Sound Editors) recognize the hard work that goes into painting movies with distinct and memorable sonority. Fittingly, Pixar won Best Sound Editing: Sound Effects, Foley, Dialogue, ADR and Music in an Animation Feature Film (long award title!) for their 2009 masterpiece, Up!
Recognizing the studio for the way they masterfully handled the auditory aspects of Pete Docter’s latest film is truly a great thing, although lumping all of those categories in one seems sort of unfair to each individual involved in each distinct process. I say this because live action film gets separate awards for most aspects listed above in bold. Should I even be surprised…?
It makes no sense considering sound design is especially crucial in animation because the world is completely built from scratch. It’s not like you can automatically obtain the sounds caused by actions while "filming." In my opinion, the first half of WALL•E and Up’s "Married Life" sequence really sum up why picking the right sounds is so important in animation and that should be enough to create separate categories in this industry award…
Anyway, you can see the rest of the Golden Reel winners here.
Congratulations Pete Docter and the Up team on this important win!
Last modified: February 21, 2010
Long titles come with prestige. for example, The Dr Horrible Sing Along Blog won an Emmy for “Outstanding Special Class Short Format – Live Action Entertainment Program”. They could have just said “best produced show on the Internet” but they didn’t. I think the “Best Feature Film” should be renamed “Best fully produced film – over 1 Hour for 2010” Just rolls off the tongue.