And the Winsor McCay Award Goes To:

Monday saw the announcement of the Annie Award nominees and juried awards. In the next few weeks I will be looking at some of the people to be honored at the 35th Annual Annie Awards.

If I had a time machine where would I go? There was a famous Bob Clampett presentation that almost everybody in the animation universe was at; Jerry Beck, Eric Goldberg, John Canemaker, Mark Kausler, Tom Sito, all the crazed 70s animation influx of people growing up obsessed with animated cartoons. When Bob introduced Otto Messmer from the stage it was like dropping a bombshell.

A friend of mine who sat behind John Canemaker at that famous presentation said that it looked like someone have hit John with a cattle prod. He sat up straight and ridged like his brain had overloaded. And then he made a beeline over to Otto once the meeting broke up.

John was not the only one in that crowd wanting to meet the man who had created Felix the Cat. But John was the one who wrote the definitive work and brought Otto Messmer into the light and gave him the long overdue credit for all that he had done in the early days of animation.

John is a true scholar with a single-minded drive to get at what happened in the history of animation and bring it into the light. I had the honor of working with John in a very small way on one of his historical pursuits, the tracing down of every step of the filmmaking process on one single frame from the 1940 Disney film Fantasia. He is one of the nicest guys in the industry. He was so truly thankful for my small contribution to his research.

If John Canemaker was only an animation historian he would have earned this Winsor McCay Award several times over. Add to that his work as an animation educator and an Oscar winning animator and you have an impressive career that is long over due for this kind of recognition.

John, you are a gentleman and truely a scholar and congradulations on winning the Winsor McCay Award.