Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon and Pete Docter walked away with the feature film award for their WALL-E screenplay Thursday at the annual Humanitas Awards, which honor TV and film writers whose work enriches human understanding.

In his acceptance speech at the Beverly Hills Hotel luncheon, Reardon noted that to keep themselves thematically on-point while writing their script, the WALL-E scribes referred to their animated protagonist as Johnny Humanity-Seed.

Michael R. Strobl and Ross Katz were honored in the 90-minute category for writing the HBO film Taking Chance, Jason Katims was lauded in the 60-minute category for his Tomorrow Blues episode of Friday Night Lights, and Aseem Batra received the prize in the 30-minute category for her My Last Words episode of Scrubs.

Writer-director Cherien Dabis won the Sundance feature film award for Amreeka, and Arika Lisanne Mittman took the children's live-action award for her Spencer's 18th Birthday episode of South of Nowhere.

The Humantias Awards were founded by Rev. Ellwood Bud Kieser 35 years ago.

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