VES Awards: ‘The Lion King’ & ‘The Irishman’ Take Top Film Honors – Winners List

Erik Pedersen and Antonia Blyth
·7 min read

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Disney’s The Lion King ruled the 18th annual VES Awards, winning a pack-leading three trophies including the marquee Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature during Wednesday night’s ceremony at the Beverly Hilton.

The Jon Favreau-directed “live action” remake of the toon classic also took the hardware for Outstanding Created Environment in a Photoreal Feature and Virtual Cinematography in a CG Project, setting it up as a front-runner for the Best Visual Effects Academy Award on February 9. More on that below.

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Accepting the top prize for The Lion King, visual effects supervisor Robert Legato said: “I do feel a little guilty because the fellow nominees were so great … but I’m pretty sure I’m going to get over it. … About 1,600 of our closest personal friends were involved.”

Netflix’s The Irishman and Laika’s Missing Link were the only other multiple winners on the film side. The time-jumping, de-aging film by Martin Scorsese, who received the VES Lifetime Achievement Award tonight, took Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature and a compositing award. The stop-motion Missing Link won for Visual Effects in an Animated Feature and Animated Character in an Animated Feature.

Also picking up a pair of trophies tonight were Disney+’s rookie series The Mandalorian, HBO’s recently wrapped Game of Thrones, Netflix’s creepshow Stranger Things 3 and the Ridley Scott-helmed commercial “Hennessy: The Seven Worlds.”

The Star Wars universe was well represented Wednesday night. Along with the dual Mandalorian wins, The Last Skywalker took Effects Simulations in a Photoreal Feature and Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance scored Visual Effects in a Special Venue Project.

Back to The Lion King and its Oscar chances. Since the VES Awards launched in 2002, the winner of its top film category has gone on to score the Best Visual Effects Oscar in 10 of the 17 years. (Hugo won the VES in the Feature Motion Picture category in 2011 and later won the Oscar.) But don’t shine up that mantel just yet: The Visual Effects Society and the Movie Academy have differed in each of the past two years, with 2017 VES winner War for the Planet of the Apes losing the Oscar to Blade Runner 2049 in 2017 and Avengers: Infinity War getting Thanos-ed by First Man at last year’s Academy Awards.

The Lion King and The Irishman will vie for the Visual Effects Oscar on February 9 against VES Awards nominees Avengers: Endgame, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and 1917.

Host Patton Oswalt kicked off the ceremony with a few zingers: “Good evening. Disney permalancers!” he said. He later picked a Cats fight, noting: “The Star Wars franchise ended after 50 years, and after one screening, so did the Cats franchise. Isn’t that amazing? Were you guys on strike when they made that one? What was going on there? That movie was a screensaver designed to not give me a boner.”

J.J. Abrams later got a big laugh with this line, after Rian Johnson has presented earlier: “I’m here tonight to present three awards — unless Rian Johnson wants to come back and present the second one.”

Scorsese was unable to attend the ceremony but accepted his Lifetime Achievement Award via video. “I’m really very sorry that I can’t be there in person,” he said. “Thank you for this honor, which is very special to me because my pictures — they’re just not known for their visual effects. … I’m sort of a latecomer. I think I did my first visual effects from a wheelchair.”

The Oscar winner added: “Out of silence came the idea of the de-aging to utilize in the making of The Irishman. We all realized the risk we were taking, and we knew it was the only way we could make the picture we wanted to make.”

Roland Emmerich, who VFX-heavy films include Stargate, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012 and last year’s Midway, picked up the VES Visionary Award on Wednesday.

“People ask me a lot, ‘Why do you make all these huge visual effects movies?’ and I have to say the stories that fascinate me most are stories where people face extraordinary obstacles,” he said onstage. “I really enjoy to put a character in crazy possible danger and then watch them overcome these insurmountable obstacles. … Working in this business for 40 years, I know that if you want to get great visual effects, you need a lot of people — sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands.”

Visual effects supervisor Sheena Duggal, whose dozens of credits range from Jumanji and Contact to Iron Man 3 and Venom, accepted the VES Award for Creative Excellence. “One of the things I love about my job is in this industry we truly succeed if we succeed together,” she said.

Here are the winners of the 18th annual Visual Effects Society Awards:

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature

THE LION KING
Robert Legato
Tom Peitzman
Adam Valdez
Andrew R. Jones

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature

THE IRISHMAN
Pablo Helman
Mitchell Ferm
Jill Brooks
Leandro Estebecorena
Jeff Brink

Outstanding Visual Effects in an Animated Feature

MISSING LINK
Brad Schiff
Travis Knight
Steve Emerson
Benoit Dubuc

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Episode

THE MANDALORIAN; The Child
Richard Bluff
Abbigail Keller
Jason Porter
Hayden Jones
Roy K. Cancino

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photoreal Episode

CHERNOBYL; 1:23:45
Max Dennison
Lindsay McFarlane
Clare Cheetham
Paul Jones
Claudius Christian Rauch

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Real-Time Project

CONTROL
Janne Pulkkinen
Elmeri Raitanen
Matti Hämäläinen
James Tottman

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Commercial

HENNESSY: THE SEVEN WORLDS
Carsten Keller
Selçuk Ergen
Kiril Mirkov
William Laban

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Special Venue Project

STAR WARS: RISE OF THE RESISTANCE
Jason Bayever
Patrick Kearney
Carol Norton
Bill George

Outstanding Animated Character in a Photoreal Feature

ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL; Alita
Michael Cozens
Mark Haenga
Olivier Lesaint
Dejan Momcilovic

Outstanding Animated Character in an Animated Feature

MISSING LINK; Susan
Rachelle Lambden
Brenda Baumgarten
Morgan Hay
Benoit Dubuc

Outstanding Animated Character in an Episode or Real-Time Project

STRANGER THINGS 3; Tom/Bruce Monster
Joseph Dubé-Arsenault
Antoine Barthod
Frederick Gagnon
Xavier Lafarge

Outstanding Animated Character in a Commercial

CYBERPUNK 2077; Dex
Jonas Ekman
Jonas Skoog
Marek Madej
Grzegorz Chojnacki

Outstanding Created Environment in a Photoreal Feature

THE LION KING; The Pridelands
Marco Rolandi
Luca Bonatti
Jules Bodenstein
Filippo Preti

Outstanding Created Environment in an Animated Feature

TOY STORY 4; Antiques Mall
Hosuk Chang
Andrew Finley
Alison Leaf
Philip Shoebottom

Outstanding Created Environment in an Episode, Commercial, or Real-Time Project

GAME OF THRONES; The Iron Throne; Red Keep Plaza
Carlos Patrick DeLeon
Alonso Bocanegra Martinez
Marcela Silva
Benjamin Ross

Outstanding Virtual Cinematography in a CG Project

THE LION KING
Robert Legato
Caleb Deschanel
Ben Grossmann
AJ Sciutto

Outstanding Model in a Photoreal or Animated Project

THE MANDALORIAN; The Sin; The Razorcrest
Doug Chiang
Jay Machado
John Goodson
Landis Fields IV

Outstanding Effects Simulations in a Photoreal Feature

STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER
Don Wong
Thibault Gauriau
Goncalo Cababca
François-Maxence Desplanques

Outstanding Effects Simulations in an Animated Feature

FROZEN 2
Erin V. Ramos
Scott Townsend
Thomas Wickes
Rattanin Sirinaruemarn

Outstanding Effects Simulations in an Episode, Commercial, or Real-Time Project

STRANGER THINGS 3; Melting Tom/Bruce
Nathan Arbuckle
Christian Gaumond
James Dong
Aleksandr Starkov

Outstanding Compositing in a Feature

THE IRISHMAN
Nelson Sepulveda
Vincent Papaix
Benjamin O’Brien
Christopher Doerhoff

Outstanding Compositing in an Episode

GAME OF THRONES; The Long Night; Dragon Ground Battle
Mark Richardson
Darren Christie
Nathan Abbott
Owen Longstaff

Outstanding Compositing in a Commercial

HENNESSY: THE SEVEN WORLDS
Rod Norman
Guillaume Weiss
Alexander Kulikov
Alessandro Granella

Outstanding Special (Practical) Effects in a Photoreal or Animated Project

THE DARK CRYSTAL: THE AGE OF RESISTANCE; She Knows All the Secrets
Sean Mathiesen
Jon Savage
Toby Froud
Phil Harvey

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Student Project

THE BEAUTY
Marc Angele
Aleksandra Todorovic
Pascal Schelbli
Noel Winzen

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