Nickelodeon/Paramount Animation Head Ramsey Naito to Receive VIEW Visionary Award

VIEW Conference organizers have announced that Ramsey Naito, Oscar-nominated producer of The Boss Baby and president of Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon Animation, will receive this year’s VIEW Visionary Award. Previous recipients of the award, presented for outstanding contribution to the visual arts, include Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger Deakins, pioneering visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren, animated feature director Nora Twomey and Pixar designer/director Ralph Eggleston.

An English-speaking event, VIEW Conference 2024 takes place October 14-19 in Turin, Italy. Tickets for this special 25th Anniversary Edition are now available at viewconference.it. 

To celebrate the award, VIEW Conference will present an exclusive live session in which Naito discusses her stellar career with Josh Cooley, Oscar-winning director of Paramount Animation and Hasbro Entertainment’s upcoming animated feature Transformers One.

Additionally, Cooley will present “Directing Transformers One,” a solo talk in which he walks the audience through the four-plus-year process of rethinking the franchise to form a completely new take on Transformers. Cooley will  also lead a workshop called “Make Me Care,” in which he shares his thoughts and approach on how to tell as compelling a story as possible. Also appearing at VIEW Conference this year is Rob Coleman, animation supervisor on Transformers One.

“Words cannot express how excited I am to present the 2024 VIEW Visionary Award to Ramsey Naito,” says Conference Director Dr. Maria Elena Gutierrez. “Ramsey’s contribution to animation throughout her career has been immeasurable, and she truly deserves this accolade.”

In her role as President of Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon Animation, Naito has been a driving force in reinvigorating the studio’s feature film animation business, with a robust and diverse slate of animated features including last year’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie, which helped the two franchises earn a combined $2.5 billion at retail in 2023 alone, as well as this year’s\ highly anticipated Transformers One, the first animated Transformers film in 20 years, with an all-star voice cast including Chris Hemsworth, Bryan Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson and Keegan-Michael Key.

Next year brings The Smurfs Movie to theatres on Valentine’s Day, also with a star-studded voice cast, led by James Corden and Rihanna, who is voicing Smurfette in addition to writing, producing and performing original songs; and quarter-century franchise SpongeBob for Christmas 2025 with The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants. In 2026, the much-anticipated Aang: The Last Airbender hits theaters in Q1, followed by a third installment of the PAW Patrol Movie series, and a sequel to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, slated for October release.

Naito previously served as Executive Vice President of Paramount Animation in 2018 before assuming her role as Executive Vice President of Animation Production and Development at Nickelodeon Animation and then President of the group. Prior, she produced DreamWorks Animation’s Oscar-nominated feature The Boss Baby, which earned her a PGA nomination for Outstanding Producer of Animated Theatrical Motion Pictures.

Cooley is an American director, screenwriter and voice actor. After graduating art school, he was hired by Pixar Animation Studios as the first intern in the story department. He worked at Pixar Animation for 18 years, contributing to many films including The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Up. In 2015, Josh became part of the Pixar Senior Creative Team and Braintrust, helping to oversee Coco, Incredibles 2, Onward and Soul. He is best known for writing on the 2015 Pixar animated film Inside Out, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. In 2019, he won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature with his feature film directorial debut, Toy Story 4. In 2020 and 2021, Josh wrote the live-action adaptation of the young adult novel Malamander for Sony Pictures, a live-action/CG hybrid film for Universal Pictures based on the classic Universal Monsters, and the live-action Tower of Terror for Disney and Scarlett Johansson, based on the Disney theme park attraction.