The 2010 winners might be announced today...
And it's probably just me, but I think the winner of 2011 might already be right here. You are most likely going to get thousands of comments on how the animation is great and how good the characters look in 3D so I'll go ahead and skip that. If there is any criticism I have to give, is that the some of the fights just seem so 'slow'. And yes, this DOES play a major factor. Speed adds emotion, which is something that this seemed to lack in some places.
Through most of the movie, it feels like I'm just watching 3D Newgrounds characters fight and move. Almost as if I'm watching a fully rendered 'test' instead. I'm sure you worked really hard on this, the concept is great (not original, but has it's own take on it), and the designs are not amateurish at all. But aside from great character modeling, it needs more than that. Watch a flash cartoon by a popular artist at 12 frames persecond instead of the usual 24 or more frames. Feels like your just watching moving images right? Same problem here.
I'm sure most reviewers will be very easily impressed, even I was impressed at the beginning. However aside from pretty animation and textures, most of the characters did nothing to really wow me. For example, all of their faces were kind of blank except for when their talking, and even than they all had little to no emotion. The characters just... fight... nothing to special, no tricks, hardly any reactions, just attack each other. I think what the movie needed was a little exaggeration to make it more interesting to watch. The atmosphere in the background is all there, but the feeling that the characters are somehow 'alive' isn't.
As I said before, the characters look great, but if you really want to make an impact, you need MORE than just that. Like I was saying, the main problem was the speed, which serves at least half of the "no emotion" problem. Where there WAS speed, there was no emotion. I told you before, you did a great job, it's just the animation I have a bit of an issue with. The textures save it though, yes, I said it could have been better, but it also could have been worse, a lot worse. It could have been plain colors and textures, no secondary motion, in a boring plain background,etc.. Thankfully I can tell your a professorial modeler though. We don't get too many 3D movies on Newgrounds, so this was a great sight, however if you go the extra mile for 3D animation, you have to also need to work with the extra, well, work it takes for proper emotion in this kind of animation. A 3D environment is a lot harder to create emotion for than one in a flash animation, and I'm afraid it just barely didn't quite reach there.
But still, you are only one person, and you did a fantastic job for what you have. I'm just saying for future reference, make characters look like they're thinking, it would really improve anything you make in the future.