Why were this year's International Animated Film Society awards like the 1980 Moscow Olympics? It's all to do with boycotts. Insisting that voting structures for the Annies, as the gongs are known, unfairly favour DreamWorks films over Pixar product, Disney – corporate masters of John Lasseter's animation house – refused to submit
Toy Story 3for this year's prizes.
With the field virtually to itself, DreamWorks'
How to Train Your Dragoneasily secured 10 statuettes. The Annies people said they had corrected any irregularities, but the Mouse House was not convinced.
The controversy began to brew when the perfectly decent Kung-Fu Panda beat the ecstatically reviewed Wall-E to the top award in 2008.
