Annecy 2017 Impressions

Annecy always reminds me how thriving the animation community is and this year's edition was no exception. In the end, I may not have seen as many films as I would have liked but the combination of wonderful people, sunshine and two pedalo rides more than outweighed that, especially looking back eight days later.

As always, I also discovered bandes dessinées I have never heard of and was introduced to the works of inventive animation directors that had previously slipped under my radar. For example, I wouldn't have chosen to go to a screening of Crystal winner LU OVER THE WALL (Yoake tsugeru Rû no uta) if my friends had not already had tickets and knew what they were in for with Masaaki Yuasa.

Overwhelming water animation in LU OVER THE WALL.

Some 2017 Favorites

My favorite film was certainly MIN BÖRDA (Niki Landroth von Bahr, 2017) from Sweden in which a couple of lonely animals "sing" about their isolation. If you're not sold after seeing the singing fish in the trailer below (how could anyone not be), then surely the prospect of an animated Roy Andersson short film will get you interested.

The Burden (Min Börda) - trailer from Niki Lindroth von Bahr on Vimeo.

MIN BÖRDA was one of several stop motion films that included a long shot showing the whole set from an outside perspective. In contrast to the more meta-level versions (akin to Fellini's E LA NAVE VA, 1983) in several other puppet films, in MIN BÖRDA it actually was a diegetic shot, though.

NEGATIVE SPACE (Ru Kuwahata/Max Porter), another stop motion short, stood out to me not only because the tone of the storytelling was just perfect but also because I really admired the careful animation, especially the make-believe wave on the beach.

Negative Space - Trailer from Tiny Inventions on Vimeo.

With the advent of digital cinema, the once extravagant cinemascope aspect ratio (1:2.39) is available to even the most underfunded film maker and therefore increasingly popular. What does not automatically come with a wider frame are the skills it takes to make such compositions work (as has been already proven during the 1950s in live-action cinema). Thankfully, Michelle and Uri Kranot mastered the format in NOTHING HAPPENS, a film "about watching and being watched". And as I have learned on vimeo, the film that with all its fixed camera setups looked so non-digital on the big screen is also a virtual reality experience:

Nothing happens- an animated virtual reality experience from Michelle & Uri Kranot on Vimeo.


Being always alert to color trends, I noticed how many of the films I liked made heavy use of blue either in conventional terms of cold v warm, orange - teal or more boldly like in MATERIAL WORLD (Anna Ginsburg) that won the Annecy Crystal for best commissioned film.

The beauty of instructional videos: MATERIAL WORLD

In that light, it certainly fitted perfectly well that in the very same commissioned film program a CNN explainer addressed the very color:

Blue - CNN from Moth on Vimeo.

The commissioned films program was a real delight because it provides a nice usually give you a nice overview of current styles popular in the more inventive sections of advertising. And for me, getting an overview is one of the things that also draws me to internationally renowned annual short film competitions like Annecy.

Some concerns about short film compilations

The programming of this section, however, is highly problematic. If you saw only one or two screenings instead of all six, you would come to an extremely distorted conclusion about current trends in animation. Because:
A) not only are many of the more experimental films lumped together into one single "off-limits" program (which both makes it harder to process them all and turns away many a viewer who normally would not mind a challenging experiment in between more easily accessible films), but also
B) the films in the five "normal" competition compilations seem to be increasingly segregated as well by style/technique and even content (I wasn't alone with the impression that I saw a program full of meta-stop motion films and one full of either handpainted or pixilation/live-action-animation combinations). It may make sense from a critic's point of view to compare three similarly themed stop motion films that feature invisible imaginary walls, but to the audience the effect is more like "oh, another one of those" which does not do the individual films justice.

Brush strokes and the power of voice acting

But to close on a more positive note: a packed Bonlieu, Grande Salle is still the most exciting place to see a film on the big screen simply because it produces the most enthusiastic audience I have ever seen. And this, of course, was the case on my first day, when I thoroughly enjoyed the first "public" screening of LOVING VINCENT and contributed to a ten minute standing ovation that made it into Variety.

Writer-director Dorota Kobiela had the crowd on her side right from the beginning when she emotionally dedicated it to her grandmother. What most surprised me - and ultimately convinced me despite the film's many flaws - was the fact that the concocted mystery plot worked so smoothly. Maybe a bit too smoothly and certainly too rushed at times when everything that vaguely resembled a reflective moment was plastered with Clint Mansell's far too obtrusive score before I had time to catch a breath.

But - and that is a much more serious problem - the film, well-acted as it is by the likes of Chris O'Dowd and Soairse Ronan, would easily work as an Irish radio play which literally means that apart from a few imaginative scene transitions the filmmakers failed to make use of the visual potential of a feature film consisting exclusively of oil paintings and simply illustrate talking heads. For sure, the paintings are expertly executed, the flow is a lot better than in almost any rotoscoped feature I have seen and the colors alone are a fantastic treat. But narratively, there is nothing gained from the brush strokes, no new insight into the characters that is not already in the dialogue. Stylistically, despite the unifying rotoscoping, the well-proportioned actors walking through off-perspective backdrops often reminded me of the Dali dream sequence in Hitchcock's SPELLBOUND where Gregory Peck stumbles through deliberately unbalancing expressionist/surrealist sets.

LOVING VINCENT: live-action v rotoscoped in oil.

But still I enjoyed it and I warmly recommend seeing it. Even if mostly for pulling this feat off and hopefully making people all around the world re-discover an artist who is so popular today that we take him for granted. And if that comes through a combination of eye candy and tv style murder mystery, so be it. I'd rather see that one again over yet another superhero origin story.

Speaking of origin stories: the basic parent - child relationship inherent to any origin story seems to have replaced the love story as the primary emotional trajectory of mainstream films from BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (Condon, 2017) to LOGAN (Mangold, 2017) or ROGUE ONE (Edwards, 2016). Thus, it came as no surprise that many films in the shorts competition dealt with remembering a recently deceased parent. A special treat was PÉPÉ LE MORSE (Lucrèce Andreae): a prime example of fluid, atmospheric storytelling - at 15 minutes it never dragged - and strong voice acting which I am very partial to yet which is not so easily found in animated short films.


Pépé le morse - Teaser from Lucrece Andreae on Vimeo.

Annecy Colors

A visit to Europe's largest animation festival reminded me of two things: colorful animation is very much alive in all parts of the world. Computer tools and the internet have enhanced the awareness and skills of color design. But the full impact of colors is only perceived in a dark theatre (or any other darkened room without contrasting colors). 

After missing out on it for several years, I managed to visit the Annecy International Animation Festival once again at last. In those two and a half days I saw a lot of films and it dawned on me that I must come back for the whole week again next year. It is, after all, a celebration of the cinema going experience and seeing a film in the packed Bonlieu rightfully gives one the impression that this is indeed "the greatest audience in the world", as some of the world-renowned guests liked to put it.

Of course, an animation festival is also a great place to see how artists work with color to tell a story and create mood. That is why I would like to share a list of films that stayed in my mind because of their colors, some of them conventional, some of them innovative. So here it is, in no particular order:

Shorts:

LA SOUPE AU CAILLOU: Cut-out animation made of vibrant layers of translucent watercolors. Striking use of basic colors red, yellow and blue. Simple but sweet children's story.

CRABE PHARE: Cruise ship passengers build a candy colored city on top of a blue crab. Diamond shaped clouds and a color scheme that looks limited but actually spreads across red, yellow, green and blue.

PETE'S STORY: High contrast duotone style with additional spot colors. Strong and beautiful anidoc.

A COAT MADE DARK: The combination of gray and orange-red is very powerful, even as subdued as in this film. Unfortunately, I could not really connect to the story but maybe a second viewing will enlighten me.

RUBEN LEAVES: A film I wanted to mention for a long time since I have seen it at least four times now. Strictly limited to three (or five, if you count the two shades of blue and yellow as two colors each) colors without variation of saturation and darkness. Outlines are also limited to the most basic needs.

LAST JUDGMENT: Not sure why the story turned out how it did, but liked it anyway. Blue and yellow.

Features:

The great thing about independent animated features (especially French ones) is that the beautifully personal design approaches that you usually only see in "art of" books are right up there on the screen. The storytelling, however, is often another story and there are reasons why some of the films are limited to special-interest audiences.
 

PSICONAUTAS, THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN: What works in a comic book divided up in panels and pages does not automatically make for a captivating story arc of a 76 minute film. Despite a strong and quirky opening, the narrative unravelled rather quickly. But the fine and varied choices of color and mood kept me interested.

LA JEUNE FILLE SANS MAINS: For me, this was one of the highlights of the festival. A highly inventive combination of realist animation and abstract design. The still images do not live up to the experience. The full beauty lies in the combination of mood and motion.

TOUT EN HAUT DU MONDE (LONG WAY NORTH): Technically not an Annecy 2016 film. But I bought the Blu-ray there and have never seen it before. There are no outlines, just razor sharp shapes of colors next to each other. Color-wise this is such an enormously thrilling film that I would love to look into it any further. Unfortunately, this is the only Blu-ray I own that prevents me from taking screenshots...

There are certainly many more films presented at Annecy worth checking out regarding colors, but these were among the ones I managed to see this year. I would like to end this post with a few (mostly experimental) shorts I remember fondly but not particularly related to color design:

• THE EMPTY (CHAMBRE VIDE): surprisingly fresh and poetic
• WALL DUST: experimental cinema is gaining momentum. This is a fast and excitingly unpredictable ride.
• MODERN LOVE - A KISS, DEFERRED: animated documentaries with sketches over white backgrounds have become an inflated staple of graduation film programs. This visual New York Times column nails it, though.
• I FELT LIKE DESTROYING SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL: I kept thinking: why do I never see such a film coming out of Switzerland? Then: oh wait, this IS actually a Swiss film!
• BALKON: If there is something like a genre of films that seem to be custom-made for the Annecy experience, BALKON is one of them. No, there is no "lapin" in it. Much easier: just give the crowd in the Bonlieu a reason to scream...

Annecy 2010 (2/2): short films and Andreas Hykade

Short film selection
The heart of the Annecy animation festival has always been the short film competition. This year I only saw three out of five programs. I was surprised that these 90 minute reels only contained seven to nine shorts whereas usually there were up to 15 within the same amount of time. The relative length of these shorts affected my ability to concentrate heavily. I really wished for the occasional two or three minute film that would ease the suffering of having to fight sleep during many an overlong film that began so promising. I do prefer slow-building movies over fast and flashy ones, but there has to be substance to justify the length.

Rumour has it that about 800 films had been submitted for the short film competition alone (not counting graduate films). As a result, one would expect a pretty strong competition. But it’s important to keep in mind that the preselection of films that make it into the competition (only 39 this year) is based on personal decisions by a specially designated selection committee. This year’s competition represented the selection by Isabelle Favez (Swiss director), Jennifer Oxley (American director) and Alexis Hunot (French journalist). I’m not saying that they chose the wrong films but that any other selection committee might have presented us with a totally different competition.

On a more positive note, this selection still provided a wide variety of different techniques and storytelling approaches which is why animation festivals are so inspirational. Aspects of vastly different films leave a lasting impression even if I don’t like a movie as a whole.

Strong primary colors
The vibrant color and background design of Old Fangs is one such example. One of the most important aspects for me is a film’s ability to evoke a certain mood. In recent years, excess filters and textures tended to obscure great design and flattening initially dimensional animation. I didn’t see enough films this year to say something about current trends but at least film makers are now handling textures more economically.

While the story about a cat, a fox and a wolf didn’t intrigue me much I adored the glowing evening and night colors that communicate a certain gravity that is inherent to the story. Although this kind of nostalgic color treatment has become an annoying staple in American feature animation, it looks fresh in this Cartoon Saloon produced short mainly because it was combined with non realistic water color backdrops and ornamental tree designs.

The integration of backgrounds and characters seemed more organic than in Tomm Moore’s bold Brendan feature.

 

My favorite film of the festival however was a short I have already seen online a few weeks before: Love and Theft by Andreas Hykade. (Watch a full-lenght version here.) With its original treatment of animation/comic history it also served as a suitable 50th anniversary celebration clip.

In my opinion it Hykade's best film to date. All his films are available online under www.hykade.de . Not all of his films are my cup of tea but their artistic brilliance can’t be denied (some of them are not safe for work, by the way). In German speaking countries, Hykade may be most well-known for his video clip for 10 kleine Jägermeister by Die Toten Hosen.

Although Love and Theft is an almost seven minute experimental film, its initial rhythmic drive never breaks down. You couldn’t tell if the music or the image came first, they feel so unified.

The progression of morphing “characters” is tightly structured. The individual steps vary in complexity of “character” design, morphing technique and color. Background colors alone divide the film in white, yellow, orange (which he calls red), blue and black segments. He seems to have a preference for the primary colors red, yellow and blue which can also be seen in his other color films.

We lived in grass (1995)

 10 kleine Jägermeister (1996)

The Runt (2005)

Love and Theft (2010)

He never used the hues as pure and saturated before, though. Love and Theft proves that flat primary colors don’t have to look cheap when handled by a master. Despite all the red there is no need for complimentary green or earthtones to balance it.
 

Annecy 2010 (1/2): features and old fashioned 3D effects

This year’s Annecy experience was a little different for me. Not because with its 34th edition the festival celebrated its 50th anniversary, but because I came relatively late to the party (not too many tickets left) and was only able to stay for two days due to current work assignments. This is also the reason why my promised Dumbo posts have been postponed. They are just delayed, not forgotten though, so please keep coming back here.


Traditionally I like to see as many animated features in competition as possible because most of them are not getting an international cinema release afterwards. This year I’ve only managed to see The Fantastic Mr. Fox (which still isn’t available in Switzerland), so I cannot tell if its award for best feature in competition was justified. I liked it although it somehow fell short of my expectations.

I finally saw Don Hahn’s Waking Sleeping Beauty (missing the first 15 minutes due to a misunderstanding). Hahn did a fine job even if he didn’t have time to explore some of the more interesting issues. There’s nothing much for me to say about it except that I agree with most of what Michael Barrier and Michael Sporn have written about it. I was probably most surprised that animators were not labelled yet every executive was. Or as Michael Sporn writes:

“Yet the story being told - without an iota of fat - is the story of the above-the-line players and how they felt about each other. […] Only a couple of times do we really get to imagine how the artists felt about what was going on. There’s a meeting called by Katzenberg to talk about how the people felt about the period. They explained that they weren’t able to spend appropriate time with their families because of all the excess overtime that was demanded of them. Katzenberg tears up and promises that things will get better. They don’t; things get worse.“

3D backlash sold as state of the art
Then I attended the avant-première of a Belgian children’s film called Les aventures extraordinaires de Samy. The director’s claims that this film was exclusively made to be seen in 3D were more than justified. Just when you think that 3D has finally grown out of throwing things at the audience, a veritable “fourth-wall breaker” comes along that works much better as an overdimensioned rollercoaster than the uneventful story about the coming-of-age of a cutesy ocean turtle would suggest. And yes, there are these moments where a small fish is swimming towards you out of the screen (Jaws 3-D, 1983, came to mind) or a harpoon is causing you to wince in your seat.

But the 3D really works in communicating size relations: for a long stretch the turtles are out on the ocean with little else to compare their sizes to. In these scenes the three-dimensional images not only emphasize the camera position close to the water surface but also show how small these turtles are.

It was no coincidence that Samy resembles an overlong IMAX-presentation because its production company nWave Pictures and director Ben Stassen have been doing exactly that kind of IMAX show films for years (Wild Safari 3D, Fly me to the moon). While the turtles swim all over the world and still always meet the same few characters, environmental issues are present in several scenes but never really affect the protagonists or the audience, for that matter. Spilling oil and the destruction of the Amazon forest just serve as colorful backdrops. Overall, the narrative contains no real obstacles, it all just floats along without real conflict. Seeing that without the benefits of 3D-effects would be about as interesting as seeing Magic Journeys (1975) or Captain EO (1986) in 2D. Besides, it was obvious that the presented French language track was dubbed and not the original version.

French Dubbing was also the reason why I didn’t catch the first two Toy Story movies although I would have been able to get tickets. Even though I enjoyed Samy for what it was, the fact that this year’s main 3D attractions were upgraded regular movies and an old-fashioned effects-rollercoaster made me about as enthusiastic about the future of 3D like the prospects that Brad Bird is leaving animation for MI:IV and Pixar’s next few movies are sequels. I'm still looking forward to Toy Story 3 however, if only for its Michael Arndt screenplay.

To get an impression of what makes Annecy so special, read this official blog entry.

Annecy 2009

This year’s festival didn’t have as many great events as last year’s, but the short film competition, which to me is the heart of such a festival, was quite strong. In other words: despite the lack of fresh air in the auditorium and an overkill of short films, I didn’t fall asleep as often as in previous years during these programs. Overall the shorts were highly entertaining, with some inflated platitudes and even less really thoughtful pieces. Though I liked a lot of the films, I couldn’t name one outstanding favorite. Despite that, I was quite surprised about some of the short film awards as they were predictable but not justified in my opinion (Man in the blue Gordini, Slavar) or simply puzzling (Please Say Something).

As Serge Bromberg, Annecy’s artistic director, said in his introduction speech: the audience is the most important ingredient in any successful festival. Seeing any movie in the packed Grande Salle du Bonlieu is an indescribable experience. The crowd seems to be so willing to embrace whatever is put in front of them that even mediocre films are greeted like major events. The traditional pre-show ritual consisting of throwing paper planes to the screen, a clap-along trailer and a different Gobélin intro for each day never fails to bring down the house already before the main attraction starts.

The most interesting films were clearly in the feature category. There may not have been such a breath of fresh air like Sita sings the Blues, but of the nine features I have seen, my favorite four have been stop motion films, that - with the exception of Coraline - didn’t follow genre conventions even though they succeeded in telling emotionally engaging stories. There seems to be a general assumption that animated features, even so-called daring ones like Wall-E and Up, have to follow the American blockbuster formula, no matter what content or target audience. This may be economically justified because of the high costs of big studio animation and thus the need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of all audience groups. But what bothers me most is that this development isn’t even questioned by top critics like Todd McCarthy. If it’s animation it has to follow the action film pattern. And although most of the big studio features have more in common with live-action blockbuster than cartoons, their problems and inconsistencies are overlooked as long as what is on the screen looks like a labor of love.

Well, Australia of all countries has proven this assumption wrong. Emotional payoff can be gracefully achieved without villains and the mandatory chase/action sequence near the end of the movie. In fact, 9.99$ and Mary and Max demonstrate that animated features can tackle subjects and styles more common to independent art house movies and still make you laugh and cry (in the case of Mary and Max).

9.99$ as most of you already know by now is a “large city film” focused on characters rather than story. Its episodic structure is based on short stories by Etgar Keret with intersecting characters. In short, Tatia Rosenthal’s 9.99$ is a film about real people struggling to break out of their mediocrity. It can be argued that this is something far better suited to live-action and that there are already many films that fit the pattern. It is the kind of film Robert Altman, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu and in Australia Ray Lawrence (Lantana, Jindabyne) have become associated with. For the first half hour I wondered why they made a puppet film out of it, even though the moody sets and lighting had a lot going for them. The puppets still looked somehow stilted and awkward at times, but the voice acting carried a lot of the performance (that’s saying a lot, considering that I usually believe that voice actors are terribly overrated). But the more fantastical elements of the story - it does include a recurring angel and talking chairs - blended in more naturally this way than they would have with real actors. After all, I never grow tired of seeing how ordinary people cope with life’s adversities and I can’t recall having seen it in an animated feature recently. (On a side note: why Monsters vs. Aliens was shown in competition but 9.99$ wasn’t, remains a mystery to me).

But for me (and the jury) the real winner was Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max telling the story of unlikely pen pals Mary Daisy Dinkle, an 8 year old Australian, and 44 year old autistic Max Jerry Horovitz from New York. Premise and unappealing character design may look very similar to Elliot’s long short Harvey Krumpet, but execution and storytelling are light years ahead of it. It has everything, gags, brilliant music, smooth animation, zany subtleties and most of all heart. Real heart, never sentimental, but deeply touching, you cannot watch this movie without a lump in your throat. And yes, it cost only about 8 million Australian dollars.
Apart from some small parts by Toni Collette, Philipp Seymour Hoffmann and some others, most of the film is carried by a wonderful narrator. Although the subject matter is clearly adult, it doesn’t have to rely on offensive imagery.

I was a little afraid of the new Wallace and Gromit adventure, because I feared that Nick Park may have lost his touch with those most beloved characters. No need to worry, though. While the formula is showing, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The W&G shorts have always depended on atmospheric tongue-in-cheek storytelling where the spectator and silent Gromit are ahead of Wallace. They may talk a little more this time, but my favourite scenes are still the ones where we see Gromit’s thought process through a minimum of animation. The dog has once again saved the day.

And then there was Lost and Found by Philipp Hunt, a real gem. I had to sit through a heap of unbearable TV episodes and specials just to see this story about friendship, and it was worth every minute. What Mary and Max is to adult animation, Lost and Found is to the family audience. It’s hard to believe that such a heart warming film has been given the green light in a environment. Come to think of it, Lost and Found was the only 3D animation I’ve liked in the whole festival.

And there was the other 3D, a.k.a TruD, RealD, stereoscopic vision etc. There have been stereoscopic projections before in Annecy, but this year, 3D took center stage with four movies released that way. I have managed to see all of those in the Grande Salle except for the Nightmare Before Christmas which I have already seen in 3D. While it worked very well for Coraline, which by the way is the first film I can’t imagine in any other format, Monsters vs. Aliens was less impressive and The Battle for Terra was outright terrible (nice message, bad execution), also due to projection errors. The two computer animated features showcased all the deficiencies of digital projection. It’s a pity that all my prejudices against this projection technology were cemented.

The last screening I attended was the Saturday morning “carte blanche” for Jean-Pierre Jeunet which was in his own words more like a “carte grise” (a grey card rather than a white card), because he chose most of the films from a list the festival suggested to him. As a fan of his films I was curious about his personal favorites. The program was solid (nice to see Harvey Krumpet in the context of Mary and Max) but without surprises: nothing unexpected, mostly evergreens that tended towards the dark and quirky as one could expect from the director of films like La Cité des Enfants Perdus / The City of Lost Children (1995).

I asked myself what films I would select if I had to compile a roadshow reel of shorts from a certain festival. Not all of the following shorts are among the most important, some are just plain fun, because I believe that you have to have those very short, funny films as buffers between the heavier ones.

1. Retouches (5:13)
2. Western Spaghetti (1:45)
3. El Empleo (6:19)
4. Runaway (8:40)
5. The Additional Capabilites of the Snout (5:15)
6. Mei Ling (15:36)
7. Tiny Legs of Fire (1:30)
8. The Cat Piano (8:28)
9. Muto (7:00)
10. Syötti (4:32)
11. Birth (11:45)
12. Codswallop (3:40)
13. The Tale of Little Puppetboy (18:35)

My short(s) attention span

Going through my Annecy notes again last night, I was surprised at how my opinion on some of the short films differs now from what I jotted down during or right after the screenings. Temporal distance certainly helps seeing things in perspective. [if you are just interested in a few reviews, please scroll down]

Of course, the succession of films in a 90 minute selection is very important to how I perceive each individual film because it dictates overall pacing as well as variety of subjects and styles. This becomes especially evident when a two-minute gag cartoon serves as welcome relief from sitting through 13 minutes of experimental slowness. These relief films tend to arouse more excitement than they actually deserve due to pure contrast in programming.

Other paramount factors that affect the viewing experience are my personal state of mind and outer circumstances such as high temperature or a highly responsive audience.
While by switching TV channels and surfing the internet we have learned to perceive a lot of different information in a very short period of time, this ultimately results in glancing at a lot of things but only superficially. What works perfectly for music videos, for example, is at odds with animated shorts.

I still find it quite exhausting to see 15 shorts in a row though, because I have to attune to new characters and stories every five to ten minutes. I even think that a whole DVD of (great) Looney Tunes (where I already know the characters) is more exhausting to sit through than, say, Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour Hamlet (1996).

Different from narrative live action films you have to get acquainted with and accept the visual style of an animated film first (shorts or features). It happens every so often that I reject a film on the basis of its style that is not to my taste. So I let my mind wander only to find out later that I may have missed a great story when I finally see the reason for this particular style.

Also short films fortunately are not confined exclusively to the classical three act structure, so there are endless possibilities for artists. On the other hand, as spectators we always have to adjust to the way a story is told (e.g. episodic, associative or experimental).

As I certainly love to discover new ways of storytelling, it’s still much easier for me to follow characters through a story with dramatic arcs and development. Part of the success of Peur(s) du noir (Blutch et al., 2007) as a feature – in my opinion at least – is the splitting and parallel editing of heterogeneous episodes that keeps the viewer’s interest awake even during weaker segments.

Now to come back to Annecy: in previous years there have been certain techniques (After Effects travellings, cut-out) that prevailed in competition films. Maybe things are more balanced now or I’m too close to see it, but this year I haven’t found such an overall trend.

Marina Rosset’s gentle student film la main de l’ours (CH 2008) reminded me of how little animation is necessary to make a beautiful story work (I have already seen it once before and therefore had a closer look at it). A voice-over narrator recounts the tale of three brothers living in a house in the middle of a glade. Much of its charm lies in the narrator’s sharing the youngest brother’s naïve point of view as he befriends a bear. The simple but delicate drawings suit the unprejudiced tone of the narrative.

Landing lights (Graham Young, UK 2007), a “realistic” looking experimental CGI film, managed to create a haunting atmosphere through total absence of human characters and expected sound effects. In a series of impressively lit framings an empty passenger airplane floats ghostlike through an equally empty skyscraper. Although there was no aircraft noise it reminded me of the penetrating experience of a landing plane and not of 9/11 as you might expect. This could have been one of my favourite shorts had it stopped after the first plane. But then there were three more flying through the same building which kind of ruined the initial impact for me.

When I saw the very last film in the very last competition reel I instantly knew this was going to be a strong contender for the audience award: Skhizein (Jérémy Clapin, F 2007). This short about a man who’s literally beside himself (by 91cm, to be precise) manages to incorporate 2D looking cut-out characters into a bleak 3D environment reminiscent of kitchen sink realism. All filmic devices are combined to tell a story that works on several levels. Of course, it is far from unconventional or daring, but it draws you in even after more than an hour of mixed short films.

There were two shorts that I got actively upset about. One of them was the Polish Kizi Mizi (Mariusz Wilczynski, PL 2007). But as much as I hated it during the screening – partly for it’s shameless re-use of scenes that already annoyed me the first time they came up – I have to admit that there were some formal aspects that somehow intrigued me. It is the love story “between a mouse and a cat, and the betrayal that steals into their relationship” as the press release said. Drawn in a crude black and white style one associates with Eastern European animation, every shot was framed in a different aspect ratio that suited the composition best, so the pictures never filled the screen. This permitted unimposing rhythmical play on the edges of the framing which sometimes worked in sync with the ticking of a clock on the soundtrack. There was also a lot of blurring separate layers throughout (like a multiplane camera going berserk) and a disgustingly beautiful French kiss scene. But the most audacious and striking element was a song by Peter Green and Fleetwood Mac that got played twice in full length! By the way, the end credits came two thirds in, with a lot of “story” going on afterwards. It made me really feel the 20 minutes it took…

To end this on a more positive note, I’d like to mention Passe-Vite (Ben Verschooris, Bert Dombrecht, Korneel Detailleur, 2006), a Belgian student film that made the most of its two minutes and classic stop motion setup. In a dark factory (made of rusty pipes) bananas and tangerines get assembled until increased production speed produces a squishy mess. You could read consumer criticism into it, but you don’t have to to fully enjoy it.

An amazing week in France

Even though the short films competition wasn’t that strong, this year’s Annecy Festival was one of the best festival experiences ever. The animation community is clearly alive! It was proven that even a discipline like animation has its superstars. Everybody who wanted to get a ticket for Pixar’s Presto premiere (I didn’t get one and thus did not see the film) or the Simpsons Extravaganza (I was lucky this time) knows what I’m talking about. To see people standing in line for several hours “just” to get an autograph by Dick Williams or Matt Groening was quite an unusual experience.

But for me the absolute highlight in any category was John Canemaker’s presentation of The Art and Life of Winsor McCay! It was nothing less than a revelation.
If ever you thought that Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) was just a silly old hat every animation student has to sit through, wait till you see Canemaker presenting it the way it was meant to be shown – as a vaudeville act with live musical accompaniment (Serge Bromberg on the grand piano on stage). Of course the great historian also managed to comment on the historical process at the same time as encouraging the audience to participate in the act.

A day later, there was a so-called Meeting Event where Canemaker not only spoke about difficult subject matter in animation (such as incest, kids with cancer) but also analyzed two sequences from Fantasia (1940). He pointed out in what amazingly little time a great animator could show the thought process of a character very clearly. He also talked about the importance of exaggeration in squash and stretch even in such “realistic” animation like Tytla’s Mountain Devil. While answering questions on all kinds of topics he provided hilarious imitations of Bela Lugosi and Margaret Winkler. He didn’t even lose his patience when a lady in the audience asked a rather complex question and then left the room during the answer to make a phone call.

The Simpsons Extravaganza with hosts Matt Groening and David Silverman was pure entertainment as one can imagine. It started with a standing ovation and ended with a Q&A. Inbetween there were clips and facts galore. I also attended the Pixar Renderman presentation that included a lecture by Doug Sweetland about the “non-computer” work of pre-production at Pixar. A special treat was an improvised screening of the final hand-drawn animatic.

While I have seen all of the short films and student films in competition, I have only seen five features of which I will comment only on Idiots and Angels and the winner Sita sings the Blues.

If I had to prepare just one program of short films based on what I saw in Annecy it would probably look like this:

1. Tot ou tard 5:00
2. Like me only better 5:20
3. La Main de l’Ours 4:30
4. Meorot 4:20
5. My Happy End 5:10
6. Time is running out 6:35
7. Passe-Vite 2:00
8. The Bellringer 3:51
9. City of Lights 4:36
10. La queue de la souris 4:09
11. Doxology 6:10
12. La maison en petits cubes 12:03
13. Operator 1:50
14. Death by Scrabble 5:42
15. KJFG No5 2:10
16. Skyzhein 13:40