Confessional time: I didn't vote for the Annies...

...and I don't intend to, either.

Why?

Because watching the snippets and bits and pieces of animation I was supposed to vote on was hell. I have never seen so much UGLY in one spot. If you were to sum up the entirety of what I looked at before I just gave up on the process, which incidentally was online for the first time ever, it was ALL PLUG-UGLY CGI, all the time. Except for one pencil-drawn bit of animation by Bill Plympton, the short "Don't Download This Song." That was cool. The rest of the stuff I saw just sucked and sucked and sucked.

I was not given the opportunity to vote Flushed Away as best picture. That opportunity was taken away from me. Instead, you had to make a choice between Cars, Over The Hedge, Monster House, Happy Feet and Open Season. GOOD GOD THOSE ALL SUCKED RUNNY EGGS!!!

Even the commercials were plug-ugly CGI. I mildly enjoyed the Hilton one with its recollection of Chuck Jones' The Dot And The Line, and the CGI cut-outs of the United Airlines "Dragon" commercial. But none of them said "I'm good, I'm really good, reward me!"

2006 will go down in history as the year of the crappy CGI production. No redeeming qualities. I hope I don't lose my Annie voting privileges over this by not just opting out of voting but spilling some of the beans about the super-seekrit process of voting. Maybe this year I'll be able to say I genuinely enjoyed some of the stuff and enthusiastically vote for it. Last year, however, was a desert.