The Pulcinella Lifetime Achievement and Studio of the Year awards have been announced for this year’s Cartoons on the Bay, the international festival of television Animation promoted by RAI and organized by RAI Trade. Canadian animator Gerald Potterton, Italian commercial animator Fusako Yusaki, South Korea studio Akom Prods. and Italian animation house Cartoon One will be honoured during the fest, taking place April 10-13 in Salerno, Italy.
Three-time Oscar nominee Potterton is best known for his work on the animated Beatles feature The Yellow Submarine, and for having directed the 1981 animated cult musical Heavy Metal. He will receive the Lifetime Achievement award for ‘taking British and Canadian animation, along with important artists like John Hales, Norman McLaren and George Dunning, through a new and unexplored path, and for having established it during the second half of the twentieth century as the best art form to translate and explain the social changes and the trepidations of young generations.’
Also being honoured for lifetime of achievement is Fusako Yusaki, an animator renowned for her clay-animated commercials and shorts. She was chosen for ‘aving chosen Italy as her elective homeland and for having honored Italian animation with her intense and productive artistic work, in which she was able to mix the well-known Japanese aesthetic sensibility with the important tradition of European animation.’
Akom Prods. Takes the 2008 Studio of the Year Award for its work on a number of quality European and American animated series, including The Simpsons, and for having ‘supported the industrial and artistic development of American and European animation for more than twenty years, guaranteeing customers a very high qualitative standard.’
Cartoon One, producer of the successful Italian series School of Vampires, claims the Studio of the Year honor for ‘having established itself as one of the best Italian studios in the world, a clear example of powerful imagination and entrepreneurial determination that produced successful programs and strengthened Italian animation status around the world.”
The Awards will be presented on Saturday, April 12 at 9 p.m. in Salerno. The Pulcinella Awards Ceremony will be hosted by famous Italian television presenter Paola Saluzzi. For more information on Cartoons on the Bay, go to www.cartoonsbay.com.
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