At the 46th Annual ANNIE Awards last weekend, Alonso Ramirez Ramos from Disney Television Animation made his way to the stage, accompanied by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle theme song … naturally.
“A ‘Moonlight’ moment,” said Kevin Molina-Ortiz, LMU Animation ’16. “Great way to start 2019.”
Although this wasn’t quite a repeat of the Oscars mishap from 2017, the announcers did make an initial mistake by neglecting to announce a tie for ‘Best Storyboarding in an Animated Television/Broadcast Production’.
The ANNIE award, the highest honor from the animation industry, was bestowed upon Ramirez Ramos of Disney as well as our own Lion, Molina-Ortiz. The alum received the award for his work for Nickelodeon on “Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” episode “Mystic Mayhem.” Having worked at Nickelodeon as a Storyboard Artist for two years, Molina-Ortiz recently received a promotion to Director for the “Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” series.
“Kevin was a stand-out student at LMU,” said Professor of Animation, Tom Klein. “I was lucky to be his advisor for both his thesis film and his sophomore film. I recognized his tremendous talent and vision, and now the animation studios value him too. We’ll be a hearing lot more from Kevin. An ANNIE Award in one’s early twenties is quite a feat. His is a career that is only getting started.”
