"Chipmunks", "Tinker Bell" are Surprises Up for Oscars

Twenty films have been submitted for consideration in the Animated Feature Film category at next year's Oscars. Under rules for the category, a max of five will actually be nominated.
According to the Associated Press, 20 is a record number of submissions in the category. The previous best was 17 in 2002.

The list includes some clear favorites including Up, Coraline, and Fantastic Mr. Fox. The inclusion of the upcoming animated/live-action Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel is a surprise since the film is mainly live-action like the first one.

Another surprise is Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure. The movie is considered a direct-to-video release by most but must have had the necessary theatrical release shortly before its Oct. 27 DVD/Blu-ray street.

Here are the 20 films up for consideration:

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
Astro Boy
Battle for Terra
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Coraline
Disney's A Christmas Carol
The Dolphin – Story of a Dreamer
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Mary and Max
The Missing Lynx
Monsters vs. Aliens
9
Planet 51
Ponyo
The Princess and the Frog
The Secret of Kells
Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure
A Town Called Panic
Up

No indication of quality is inferred in these submissions. They simply have been submitted by each film's producers and meet the necessary requirements. Obviously if they were submitted, the studio thinks the movie is good enough to at least be nominated.

The 82nd Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2010, at 5:30 a.m. Pacific Time. The awards will be given out on Sunday, Mar. 7.

Source: AMPAS

Neil Gaiman's 'The Graveyard Book'

This week Harper Collins published Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book ($17.99), a 320-page young adult fantasy novel with illustrations by Dave McKean. The hero of the saga is a normal boy named Nobody Owens, who is known to his friends as "Bod." Bod would be even more normal if he weren’t an orphan, who is being brought up in a graveyard by ghosts—and he dares not leave the graveyard for fear that he will be attacked by a man named "Jack" who has already killed Bod’s parents.

Gaiman’s fertile imagination is on full display in this richly textured novel, which includes a mysterious graveyard gateway that leads to a desert in which there is an abandoned city populated only by ghouls, and then there is the ancient Indigo Man who lives under the hill, and the unforgettably strange and scary menace of the Sleer.

Gaiman’s previous YA novel Coraline has been made into a stop-motion animated feature film and adapted as a graphic novel by P. Craig Russell as well (see “Coraline Set for Feb. 6th Debut”).