Being Colombian is an act of faith. This is how Jorge Luis Borges aptly puts it in his short story ‘Ulrikke,’ published in a 1975 collection. And although I have felt that my identity as a Colombian has always been somewhat unstable or in doubt for a variety of reasons (like growing up in an increasingly globalized world), it was never as affirmed as it was when I went to the cinema to see Disney’s recent computer-animated feature Encanto (Byron Howard & Jared Bush, 2021) in the UK.
Read MoreAnimation is usually mentioned in the review section of a newspaper, and non-English language animation aimed at children is generally ignored all together. This was not the case with the new Danish children’s television program John Dillermand, which jumped into non-Danish consciousness in a news story published in The Guardian and on CNN in the first week of January 2021.
Read MoreCartoon Saloon has carved out a niche in the indie animation scene. With the exception of The Breadwinner (Nora Twomey, 2017), which was adapted from the Deborah Ellis book of the same name, all of the Irish animation studio’s films have drawn their influence from Celtic myths and legends. Various fantastical creatures, from faeries to selkies, are woven into the fabric of the stories they tell.
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