Overalls and Uh Oh
Gladstone’s first recollection is his own, from before he was even an ASIFA member. He’d just arrived in California in the mid-1990s to do work with Warner Bros. “I was underneath the sink fixing something,” he says, “and my wife said, ‘Don’t you have that Annies thing?’ ‘Oh yeah,’ I said, ‘I gotta go.’ I had grease on my shirt and I was wearing overalls. I quickly changed my t-shirt.
“[The ceremony] was at the Pasadena Civic, which has something like 3,000 seats, but the Annies themselves back then were very small. Maybe 400 people in the corner of the auditorium. The rest of the place was empty. I was late because I’d forgotten about it. So I get there in my overalls and go in. I didn’t have to have a ticket or anything. And I look down and see this group rows and rows in front of me. They’re wearing tuxedos and fancy clothes. I think, uh oh, and sit in the back where nobody can see me. When the ceremony was over and everybody was getting up, I just scrammed out of there.”
Celebrating the Forgotten
From this inauspicious beginning, Gladstone went on to join the board, and he has been executive producing the ceremony since he became Executive Director in 2012. He says he’s an easy crier, and there’s usually a part in every ceremony where he thinks, I hope I don’t have to speak now.
One such moment came in 2019 when Frank Braxton received the Winsor McCay award for his career contributions to the art of animation. Having passed away 50 years earlier, “He had been forgotten by most of the [animation] community, but he was, for all intents and purposes, our Jackie Robinson,” Gladstone says. Braxton worked on classics like The Bullwinkle Show as a director and Mister Magoo as an animator, as well as on successful commercial campaigns including Cap’n Crunch. In 1960 he became president of the Screen Cartoonists Guild. “He’d had a color bar to get through, but the community in general welcomed him then, and his family told us how much they appreciated it.” Braxton’s wife and children accepted his posthumous award, and his son spoke of “the humanity we came to know during his career.” That, Gladstone says, “was particularly poignant.”
We’re All Human
Each ceremony inevitably has its elements of surprise, whether it’s an award recipient ignoring the timeclock, a presenter announcing the wrong name, or a legendary winner with a potty mouth. “We gave a Winsor McCay to a very famous guy named Walt Peregoy,” Gladstone says. “He was too ill to come, so we went out to film him.”
Peregoy was known for being a curmudgeon and was famous for cussing people out. Gladstone and his team weren’t sure what to expect, and when they turned on the camera, they got a surprisingly generous speech. Teary, Peregoy declared, “Everybody has talent … and their accomplishments are as great as anybody else’s.” Then he added, in classic Peregoy fashion, “I have to say that because we’re what make up this world. A**holes. Hey, we all have one.” Laughing, Frank says, “That was his reputation. We left it in.”
The 48th Annual Annie Awards will be held virtually on Friday, April 16, 2021.
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