SHORTS — current posts — Fantasy/Animation

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

Review: Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot, 2024) - Fantasies in the Trash Heap

Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot, 2024), the stop-motion story of Grace (or Gracie) a young mollusc-obsessed girl growing up in 1970s Australia, is not a fantasy film. Unless, of course, it is entirely a fantasy. As Grace thinks back over her life, and how she found herself in the ‘present day,’ she offers her pet snail Sylvia (and by extension the audience) a tale as bizarre, incongruous, and carefully curated as the vast array of snail-related memorabilia she has collected over the years.

FILM REVIEWMarkus BeekenJune 21, 2024SHORTS, CRAFT, CHILDHOOD, STOP-MOTION, FAMILY Comment

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).