The selection of nine animated feature films for children and adults will take you to the North Pole (Long Way North), follow a soft-hearted wrestler into war (Cafard), throw you into a comic strip world of sci-fi steampunk (April and the Extraordinary World), accompany an African boy on his journey into the promised Europe (Adama), paint a post-apocalyptic fairy tale for adults (Psiconautas, the Forgotten Children), enthral you with a humanistic tale of one man’s struggle to survive (The Red Turtle), help you find friends in a children’s home (My Life As a Courgette), and help you discover your true identity (Anomalisa, first theatre screening in Slovenia).
Adama
Adama is an invitation to see through new eyes a chapter in history we think we know. A deeply subjective inverted fable. An exploration by a child from "somewhere else" of our sick and self-destructive world, which he attempts to re-enchant through poetry and magic.
Adama is set in a specific period – the First World War – but it is not an historical film. It is a tale which along the way turns into an historical account. What is important for us is the contemporary resonance of Adama's adventure. We know animation has the ability to connect audiences with the character's innermost being, to make perceptible Adama's changing view of the world, a world at war, which eventually gave rise to today's society.
This war represented a crucial moment in the relationship between Africa and Europe. For, at the very peak of its brutality, the supremacy of the colonists began to wane. Travelling to France as native soldiers, the “colonized” found themselves in the position of observer, explorer, ethnologist and learnt to see the world with new eyes. Although World War One, and its trenches, was one of the bloodiest and most barbaric chapters in human history, it was also, paradoxically, a vast melting pot where, for the first time in history, the peoples of the world met. A kind of genuine but, certainly, botched birth of today’s world.
- Julien Lilti and Simon Rouby
Anomalisa
The first animated film directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson began its life as a play in 2005, as part of composer Carter Burwell's adventurous Theater of a New Ear project, described as 'a concert for music and text, or a set of "sound plays". When Anomalisa began its transition to the screen, the theatrical script for the most part remained the same.
The script felt from the beginning like it could be animated — it lends itself to the medium. As far as the team we assembled, the stop-motion world is a fairly small community; everybody knows everybody. It was simply a matter of finding the right people who were available.
- Duke Johnson
For Kaufman and Johnson, the biggest challenge in bringing Anomalisa to the screen in the stop-motion format was figuring out how to create something visual out of a project that was specifically conceived not to be visual. "Some of the major conceits of this piece are written so that the audience has to make them up," concludes Kaufman. "Without being too specific about what those things are, figuring out how to translate that through images became a long, complex process — so it was exciting when this started to feel like a movie and not a sound play. Certain things play differently when you put them on a screen than when you put them inside an audience's head, like in the staged version. It's hard for us to think of Anomalisa as that other thing now."
Awards
- Grand Special Jury Prize Venice Film Festival, 2015;
- Best Animated Feature at San Francisco Film Critics Circle, 2015;
- Best Animated Film at San Diego Film Critics Society Awards, 2015:
- FIPRESCI Prize at Tromsø International Film Festival, 2016
- Academy Award 2016 nomination.
April and the Extraordinary World
From the creators of the Academy Award-nominated Persepolis and the mind of renowned graphic novelist Jacques Tardi comes a riveting sci-fi adventure set in an alternate steampunk world.
Working with Jacques Tardi was great but not easy. It’s the first time his universe was adapted in animation. The singularity of his style made his success and Tardi is a monument of the French comic book field. The quest for progress and a better life can have dark consequences. This is why I wanted to make this film. This is a uchronia—an alternate history. You can recognize Paris but it is weird. Several famous places are in the film, like the Eiffel Tower and The Grand Palais botanic museum. So we took a lot of photos of these different places, like Tardi used to make his books. And we had a lot of documents: old pictures of Paris, of the 1900 Universal Exhibition. The [bleak] color palette is inspired by the colors Tardi uses and by German Expressionism French polar (crime thrillers) of the ’40s.
- Christian Desmares
Awards
- Cristal at Annecy International Animated Film Festival, 2015;
- Audience Award at Animafest Zagreb, 2015.
My Life As a Courgette
This film is also, and above all, an homage to neglected and mistreated children who do the best they can to survive and live with their wounds. Courgette, our hero, has been through many difficult times and, after having lost his mother, he believes he is alone in the world. That was without counting on the people he would meet in his new life in the foster care center: having a group of friends you can rely on, falling in love, and why not even being happy one day? He still has many things to learn in life. It is this message, at once simple and profound, that seemed essential to convey to our children. And the wish to share this message was what guided me during the course of directing the film.
- Claude Barras
There’s a form of boldness and simplicity in Courgette that won me over. For simplicity is essential not to succumb to the sirens’ call of excess, or the temptation of playing god and creating one’s own little world. And it takes guts and daring to convince yourself that the story of a little boy who kills his alcoholic mother and so ends up in an orphanage is the perfect pitch for a children’s film. And yet, when you think of the children’s tales that have been handed down to us through the ages, they often have very dark premises, such as LittleThumbling, or Hansel&Gretel…
Fairy tales are cruel, My Life as a Courgette isn’t. The project has the strength and tenderness of a coming of age story, committed to reflecting a world that already exists, our world, which is that of the children whom this film aims to speak to.
- Céline Sciamma
Awards (selection):
- Cristal and Audience Award at Annecy International Animated Film Festival, 2016;
- Audience Award at San Sebastián International Film Festival, 2016;
- Audience Award at Warsaw International Film Festival, 2016;
- Kids Jury Award at Zurich Film Festival, 2016;
- European Animated Feature Film 2016 nomination at the 29th European Film Awards.
Cafard
Jan Bultheel's first animated feature film, Cafard is completely author driven. Jan wrote the script, designed the graphic style, directed the actors, edited and staged the scenes, guided the animation team and he even textured all the models and sets himself.
Motion capture technology is an innovative industry on the rise. Cafard is a film for an adult audience wherein we capture the realistic actions of the characters, thereby automatically triggering an emotional impact of recognition in the audience that cannot be achieved using any other technique.
In Cafard, CGI-technology is stripped to a bare minimum. The final result is a simple graphic universe that emphasizes dramatic action of the characters over technological wizardry.
For me, Cafard is also an artistic challenge, to generate maximum impact with very limited resources. Sometimes a well-chosen color says more than a long dialogue. Sometimes one pencil line can suggest a setting better than a thousand props. Cafard wants to shine through its simplicity. Say more with less.
- Jan Bultheel
Awards:
- Honourable mention of the Jury at the Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF),
- World Soundtrack Award at the Gent Film Festival (music composer: Hans Helewaut),
- Juries’ Special Award & Feature Film Public Jury Award at ReAnimania Festival (Armenia).
Long Way North
Long Way North is a subjective film from Sasha’s point of view. [...] She is a fascinating character to follow, because she’s always on the move.
From the very start of the film, she’s ready to leave home and travel far, far away. All I needed was the spark to set her off, a crisis to send her running to the Far North. Sasha pushes her way right past the expectations society tries to contain her in, bursting through the restrictions of the 19th century to find her own place in the world. I could sense that Sasha was a deeply modern character whose story needed to be told.
To me, drawing is about interpreting reality – it’s a way to look at a chair, to make the spectator interpret that chair in a way that says something. I think the style of Long Way North is a way to look at reality through light, shapes, and colors, evoking emotion and tickling the imagination.
Reproducing reality, with reflections and everything – it doesn’t really interest me. I don’t want to spend the budget on showcasing each of Sasha’s hairs in detail. The simple shape of her hair, combined with the rhythm the wind adds to it, contributes to the film’s poetry.
- Rémi Chayé
Awards
- Audience Award at Annecy International Animated Film Festival, 2015;
- Grand Prize at Tokyo Anime Award Festival, 2016;
- Audience Award at COLCOA French Film Festival, Hollywood, 2016.
Psiconautas, the Forgotten Children
Being more an ensemble piece than Birdboy's own story, Psiconautas uses its flashbacks to navigate through a more calm and peaceful past; to compensate for the beauty shown, hallucinations never fail to impress. … Its characters are the ones you care about; it's the small necklace put in Dinky's ear that ensures that their intentions might somehow be fulfilled – even though not in their world. Adult to the core, one of the most sincere animation features in recent years.
- Vassilis Kroustallis, Zippy Frames
Alberto Vázquez is animation director, illustrator and cartoonist. Before making the film Psiconautas, the Forgotten Children he also created the graphic novel of the same name. His books and comics have been published in countries such as Spain, France, Italy, Brazil and Korea. Based on his own comics he has written and directed short animations Birdboy and UnicornBlood. His work has been nominated on two occasions for the Goya Awards, winning the Goya for Best Animated Short Film in 2012.
Awards:
- Best Feature Film and Audience Award at ToHorror Film Fest, Torino (Italy), 2016;
- Best Animated Feature Film at Fantasia International Film Festival, Montreal (Canada), 2016;
- Best Animated Feature Film at Festival of Animated Film Stuttgart (Germany), 2016;
- Lurra Award at San Sebastian International Film Festival (Spain), 2015.
- European Animated Feature Film 2016 nomination at the 29th European Film Awards.
The Red Turtle
For Michael Dudok de Wit, The Red Turtle was the film where he discovered digital. While they were doing the first animation tests in the Prima Linea studio, another crew was finalising their film using a digital pen. With this tool, the results of animation can be visualized instantly, without having to scan drawings separately. Dudok’s team then animated two versions of the same shot, one with pencil on paper and the other with this digital pencil. The line of the digital pencil was more beautiful and that convinced them. For the backgrounds, they chose a different process. The drawings were made with charcoal on paper, very freely, with broad strokes smudged with the palm of the hand. This artisanal quality was very important and gave the image a lovely, grainy texture.
The film tells the story in both a linear and circular manner. And it uses time to relate the absence of time, like music can enhance silence. This film also speaks of the reality of death. Man has a tendency to oppose death, to fear and fight against it, and this is both healthy and natural. Yet we can simultaneously have a beautiful and intuitive understanding that we are pure life and that we don’t need to oppose death. I hope the film conveys that feeling.
- Michael Dudok de Wit
Awards
- Un Certain Regard - Special Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival, 2016;
- Audience Award and Special Mention at Athens International Film Festival, 2016
- European Animated Feature Film 2016 nomination at the 29th European Film Awards.