Review: Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) 2024
For animation lovers, the past year might have felt quite bleak. The ongoing battle against confusing algorithms (constantly demanding more output for a lesser audience) for independent creators on social media, paired with the unfair labor conditions highlighted by both the Animation Workers Ignited collective and the press (Stedman 2024), stands in stark contrast to the historical box-office records set by animated films this year. As of October 2024, Inside Out 2 (Kelsey Mann, 2024) remains the highest-grossing animated feature film ever released, despite the "horrendous" working conditions reported by IGN (Stedman 2024). Additionally, as Cartoon Brew pointed out, five out of the top ten films this week are animated — a first in history (Amidi 2024a).
Fig. 1 - The annual Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF).
With all of this unfolding against the backdrop of Generative AI’s rising role in the entertainment industry. Unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence remains a major negotiation point for The Animation Guild (TAG)’s union contract renewal, one year after the historic SAG strike that immobilized much of the U.S. film industry. The TAG’s AI Task Force, established in 2023 to investigate the impact of machine learning and AI on animation and its workers, reveals that 75% of 300 entertainment executives state that Generative AI had led to the elimination, reduction, or consolidation of jobs in their divisions, and 90% predict that AI would play an even larger role. The Task Force also anticipates that more than 20% of U.S. entertainment industry jobs (around 118,500) could be affected by Generative AI by 2026, emphasizing the need to value human labor (The Animation Guild, 2024).
Given this gloomy context, this is why industry-focused festivals like the Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) are so, so important (Fig. 1). Over five days in late September, we were reminded of the real people — the workers, the artists, the institutions, the curators — who create and shape the independent animation scene on a global scale (for a full list of OIAF winners, please click here).
Fig. 2 - Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024).
Fig. 3 - Boris Labbé’s Glass House (2024).
Festivals, by their nature as condensed, short events, provide a unique space to explore new (and sometimes provocative) ideas. While the jury’s choices for major awards were relatively predictable — Flow (2024) by Gints Zilbalodis (Fig. 2) continued its successful run with the Grand Prize for Feature Animation — it felt the festival’s ability to push boundaries was best reflected in the XPPen Craft Award for Best Animation Technique, which went to experimental short film Glass House (2024) by Boris Labbé (Fig. 3). Self-admittedly using artificial intelligence and 2D computer animation, there is no doubt that Glass House embraces its own technicality, and the jury praised it as an “experiment that leaves the viewer curious and intrigued by vibrating patterns and complex layers, all while creating a hypnotic geometric dance,” making it a fitting addition to Labbé’s rich audiovisual existing catalog of experimental media. However, this choice for Best Animation Technique seemed quite at odds with the festival’s focus on traditional methods, especially considering the concurrent screening series “Threads and Fibres: Animated Textiles,” curated by researcher and artist Alla Gadassik to explore the material history of animation.
For independent animators, awards are an important currency for securing grants and funding. On a side note, the stark difference in funding between the U.S. and Canadian/European animation scenes — where one often relies on independently-led crowdfunding and the other on generous national grants — was so obvious at the festival that it became a running joke among attendees, as seen in memes shared on Instagram by 24memespersecond. Who gets which award is thus not as neutral as one might believe.
It’s hard not to think back to Who Said Death is Beautiful? (2023) by Ryo Nakajima, the AI-generated film featured at the 2024 Annecy Festival, and the statement released by creative director Marcel Jean following backlash: “This year, we received dozens of submissions using artificial intelligence in one way or another. We felt it was important to select a few of these works so that discussion and debate about artificial intelligence focused on specific, tangible applications rather than being limited to theoretical or hypothetical. Above all, we believe that the presence of creators using these tools is vital for the discussion to exist” (Amidi 2024b). Awarding a technical prize to a film using AI in 2024 seems like a clear statement: AI is here to stay, and it is time to include it in the conversation.
Fig. 4 - Firas Shehade’s machinima Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another: A Rehearsal (2023).
Addressing another pressing issue, OIAF also curated the screening series “What Is It Good For? Experiences of War in Animation,” as well as the special screening “Potatoes and Kings: Folk, Political, and Absurd in Ukrainian Animation,” including a personal favourite of mine Love and Death of the Ordinary Potato (Natalia Marchenkova, 1990). These special screenings and retrospectives feel particularly relevant to mention as, throughout the festival, the keffiyeh, pamphlets for Gaza and pins worn by attendees served as a constant reminder that the war still weighed heavily on all of us. I even found myself feeling uneasy watching Once Upon a Time on Earth (2024) by Phil Mulloy, in which aesthetics and sounds of war are decontextualized. It seems that after a year of being constantly exposed to surrealistically violent images online, animation can no longer catch up with reality. I hope that in the coming year, the festival will formally acknowledge this by organizing another screening that addresses the ongoing conflict and its impact on Middle Eastern animation industries. I am here thinking of the Gaza Animation Workshop led by Palestinian animator Haneen Koraz, where children in Gaza are taught animation to process traumatic experiences, and of Firas Shehade’s machinima Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another: A Rehearsal (2023) (Fig. 4), both projects speaking on Palestinian animation as expressing “the social and political realities of a people living under physical and digital occupation” (Sayfo 2021, 83).
Fig. 5 - The Grand Prize for Short Animation - La Voix des Sirènes (Gianluigi Toccafondo, 2024).
Finally, I want to highlight some of my favourite films from the short film competition. As someone who loves realism in animation, I was captivated by Percebes (2024) by Alexandra Ramires and Laura Gonçalves (winner of Best Design), an animated documentary that examines the impact of tourism on locals in Algarve, Portugal, where scenes flow together through the symbolic crustaceans, goose barnacles (percebes). High Street Repeat (2023) by Osbert Parker and Laurie Hill similarly uses a mix of stop-motion and archival photography to peel back the layers of migration and culture in Britain. On the topic of archives, Entropic Memory (2024) by Nicolas Brault is a moving exploration of his personal family album's slow deterioration after a water accident. The Car That Came Back From The Sea (2023) by Jadwiga Kowalska (winner of the Hélène Tanguay Award for Humor) was another standout, a hilarious animated documentary about young friends in 1980s Poland — I especially enjoyed the clever use of speech bubbles for subtitles. Other funny favourites included Bunnyhood (2024) by Mansi Maheshwari (a quite dramatized version of a hospital visit), The Fold (2024) by Patrick Buhr (a commentary on online dating), and Pinocchio by Jonny Crickets (2024) (one of two Pinocchio-themed films screened, alongside Gina Kamentsky’s Pinocchio in 70mm by Gina Kamentsky [2024]).
My favourite short film of the festival, which actually won the Grand Prize for Short Animation, was La Voix des Sirènes (2024) by Gianluigi Toccafondo. Funnily enough, during the award ceremony, we were informed that Toccafondo (who was not in attendance) could not be reached and thus did not know yet he had won the prize! Old-school style. His film, about mermaids struggling to survive in a hostile environment, featured a mesmerizing combination of mixed media, animated paintings, dark backdrops, and haunting music that lingered long after the credits—it felt like a film taking itself very seriously, in a way that not every movie screened at the festival succeeded to.
**Article published: October 18, 2024**
References
The Animation Guild. 2024. “AI and Animation.” Animation Guild (September 2024), available at: https://animationguild.org/ai-and-animation/.
Amidi, Amid. 2024a. “A Historic Box Office Weekend: Five Of The Top Ten Films Are Animated Features.” Cartoon Brew (October 12, 2024), available at: https://www.cartoonbrew.com/box-office-report/a-historic-box-office-weekend-five-of-the-top-ten-films-are-animated-features-243321.html.
Amidi, Amid. 2024b. “Annecy Festival Responds To Criticism Of Selecting Film Made In Part With AI Technology.” Cartoon Brew (May 21, 2024), available at: https://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/annecy-festival-responds-to-criticism-of-selecting-a-film-made-in-part-with-ai-technology-241230.html.
Sayfo, Omar. 2023. Arab Animation: Images of Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Stedman, Alex. 2024. “Inside Out 2 Was the Hit Pixar Needed, but the Laid-off Employees Who Crunched on It Are Still Hurting.” IGN (September 16, 2024), available at: https://www.ign.com/articles/inside-out-2-was-the-hit-pixar-needed-but-the-laid-off-employees-who-crunched-on-it-are-still-hurting.
Biography
Aurélie Petit is a PhD Candidate in the Film Studies department at Concordia University, Montréal. She specializes in the intersection of technology and animation, with a focus on gender and sexuality. Over the last year, she was a Doctoral Fellow in AI and Inclusion at the AI + Society Initiative (University of Ottawa), collaborating with Professor Jason Millar and the CRAiEDL on the ethics of synthetic pornography. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @aurelievpetit.