FESTIVAL — current posts — Fantasy/Animation

Review: International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film 2024

While the legal, economic and ethical impact of generative AI continues to ripple through the media industry at large, one might be forgiven to find at least a modicum of solace in the belief that independent animation continues to be, in some ways, a world apart. This is not to say, of course, that animators, even art-house animators, are somehow shielded from the disruptive potential of exploitative technological innovations, or immune from the material and ideological concerns that affect the rest of the image-making community.

EVENT REVIEWPM CicchettiDecember 6, 2024DOCUMENTARY, FESTIVAL, REPRESENTATIONComment

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).

EVENT REVIEWAurélie PetitOctober 18, 2024FESTIVAL, SHORTSComment

Annecy and Animafest Zagreb in the 1980s: Building Bridges for the Sino-European Opening-up in Animation

The following excerpts are taken from my recent book Chinese Animated Film and Ideology. Tradition, Innovation, Interculturality (2024) published by the CRC Press. This book will be of great interest to those in the fields of animation and film studies, political science, Chinese area studies, and Chinese philology. It especially considers animation film festivals history, paying particular attention to the culture-building role of the festivals Annecy (France) and Animafest Zagreb (former Yugoslavia) in the 1980s.

EDITORIALOlga BobrowskaMay 31, 2024CHINA, FESTIVAL, SHANGHAI ANIMATION FILM STUDIOComment

Review: Rebel Dykes (Harri Shanahan & Siân A. Williams, 2021)

Reading through the LGBT+ History Month blog posts on Fantasy/Animation, I was struck by the fact that of the few depictions and readings of queer women in animation, all of them feature in films or television series targeted primarily towards younger audiences, e.g. Princess Bubblegum and Marceline in Adventure Time (Pendleton Ward, 2010-18), She-Ra in She-Ra: Princesses of Power (Noelle Stevenson, 2018-20), and Elsa in Frozen (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2013).

FILM REVIEWSarah WingroveApril 2, 2021LGBTQ+, REPRESENTATION, QUEER IDENTITY, FESTIVALComment

Animation Archives

As academics we find it easy to converse about the complete, those films that have made their way onto the screen and given audiences pleasure and academics room for discourse and assessment. The ‘completed’ animation finds itself venerated the world over and as a medium, or art form, it appears capable of fitting almost any brief, defying the shackles of live-action and capable of producing, from a visual point at least, works of both realism and fantasy that are only limited by the imagination and skills of the creator.

EDITORIALSteve HendersonOctober 25, 2019FESTIVAL, FILM PRACTICE, CREATIVE PRACTICE, ANIMATION, ARCHIVESComment

Review: Annecy International Animation Film Festival (2019)

Located in Annecy, France, the Annecy International Animation Film Festival was founded in 1960 and has been held annually since 1997. This year, the festival took place 10th-15th June, boasting its usual range of screenings and events: features, shorts, student films, television shows, commissioned works, and VR works (Fig. 1). The shorts in particular displayed a wide collection of animated techniques and materials. Highlights include the clay-on-glass musical retelling of America’s first circus elephant in The Elephant’s Song (Lynn Tomlinson, 2018), the self-reflexive Pinscreen exercise Jim Zipper (Alexandre Roy, 2018), and the impeccably smooth stop-motion porcelain animals of Winter in Rainforest (Anu-Laura Tuttelberg, 2019).

EVENT REVIEWFrancis M. AgnoliJune 21, 2019FANTASY, ANIMATION, FESTIVAL, SHORTSComment