Since 1972, Annie Awards has handed out plaques to deserving animators across film and video games. The nominees for the 52nd Annie Awards were recently unveiled and Astro Bot didn’t make the cut—neither did Black Myth: Wukong.
The Annie Awards is presented by the Los Angeles branch of the International Animated Film Association (ASIFA-Hollywood). It honors excellence in animation shown in American cinema and television.
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Annie Awards was initially conceived as a way of celebrating lifetime or career contributions to animation. However, in 1992, it evolved and the award is now handed to individual animation works. The category that caught our interest is “Outstanding Character Animation – Video Games”.
The category was added at the 42nd Annie Awards in 2014. The inaugural edition of this category was won by Assassin’s Creed Unity (Ubisoft Montreal), which beat Don’t Starve: Console Edition (Klei Entertainment Inc.) and Child of Light (Ubisoft Montreal).
The most recent award in this category was won by Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (Insomniac Games). The second main installment in the web-swinger franchise beat Atomic Heart, Hogwarts Legacy, Let’s Revolution, and Teslagrad 2 to win the award.
52nd Annie Awards nominees
This year’s nominee list is missing some of the massively successful games released this year. However, we are excited that Neva has yet again made the list. It is a game that we massively enjoyed playing and rooted for. Neva won the Games for Impact at The Game Awards ceremony held earlier this month.
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The Annie Awards is presented to the animator behind the game or a team of animators—in which case the name of the studio will be given as the animator instead of the individual animator(s). Here is the full nominee list in this category arranged in alphabetical order.
- #BLUD by Exit 73 Games (Chris Burns, Bob Fox)
- Asgard’s Wrath 2 by Sanzaru Games (Sanzaru Games Animation Team)
- Diesel Legacy by Maximum Entertainment
- Neva by Nomada Studio (Nomada Studio Animation Team)
- Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II by Ninja Theory
The 52nd Annual Annie Awards will be held on Saturday, February 8, 2025, at UCLA’s Royce Hall in Los Angeles, California at 7:00 p.m. The dress code for the event is “black tie affair, after-five attire”. See the full nominee list of all the different categories here.
Do you think the games nominated for the 52nd Annie Awards are the most deserving in character animation of all the games released this year? GameBaba Universe would love to hear your thoughts.
