ASIFA-Hollywood will present its 2009 Winsor McCay Awards for career achievement in animation to Tim Burton, Bruce Timm and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
The awards, named for the pioneering animation and comic artist, will be presented Feb. 6 at the 37th annual Annie Awards at UCLA’s Royce Hall.
Best known as a live-action director, Burton began his career in animation working on such Disney movies as Tron and The Fox & the Hound. In addition to a live action filmography that includes Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Burton produced the stop-motion feature The Nightmare Before Christmas and co-directed the 2005 feature The Corpse Bride. He also co-produced the animated features James and the Giant Peach and 9, and is working on turning his short film Frankenweenie into an animated feature.
Bruce Timm began working in animation in the 1980s, first at Filmation and then at Warner Bros., before finding a permanent home in the DC Universe as co-producer of the acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series. Timm’s distinctive and classic take on the Dark Knight helped revive the superhero franchise in animation and lead to his working on multiple DC-related series such as Superman, Batman Beyond, Justice League Unlimited and the direct-to-video DVD features Superman-Doomsday, Justice League: The New Frontier, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern: First Flight.
Currently CEO of DreamWorks Animation, Jeffrey Katzenberg had already established himself as a successful Hollywood studio executive before taking on the task in 1984 of overseeing Walt Disney Feature Animation. He supervised a string of hits that revived the studio and the artform, including The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King before departing to form DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. Under Katzenberg, DreamWorks has produced a steady stream of animated film from The Prince of Egypt to Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda and Monsters vs. Aliens.
