By Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest)
If I only had the riches, I’d go to France in high style to enjoy the 2017 Annecy International Animated Film Festival, which takes place from June 12 to 17. There’s tons of special events and programming being offered.
After watching Captain Underpants, I’m interested in learning about the difficulties involved in translating printed artistic material to film. Acclaimed Canadian artist/director Robert Valley has a panel, From Graphic Novels to Animated Music Videos and Short Films, which I feel will be very insightful.
And representation from Canada is not limited. The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) will have a press conference, which will take place on June 14 at 10:30 a.m., and be presenting many animated shorts, a VR experience for attendees to enjoy (Blind Vaysha is being previewed in this medium), highlighting a retrospective on Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, and be placing four film in competition. For the latter, I have seen a few of the pieces, and I am anxious to learn who will stand out when animation aficionados will have their eyes and ears about the news coming out of this show.
Also, the nerd in me wants to know what the next animated Marvel Entertainment piece, Ant-Man, will look like. Animators Ugo Bienvenu and Kevin Manach will be talking about their work in this series.
Can someone buy me a plane ticket, please?
From the Press Release, the details revealed are:
Following immediately upon its world premiere at the 56th Semaine de la Critique at the Cannes Film Festival, THE TESLA WORLD LIGHT by Matthew Rankin will be screened in official competition at Annecy, along with Diane Obomsawin’s I Like Girls, which received the Grand Prize for Independent Short Animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival and the Guy L. Côté Award for Best Canadian Animated Film at the Sommets du cinéma d’animation in Montreal. The third NFB film in competition at Annecy, Manivald, by Chintis Lundgren, will have just had its world premiere on June 6 at Animafest in Zagreb, where it will be competing in both the Short Films and Croatian Film categories. The fourth NFB film, Hedgehog’s Home by Eva Cvijanović, will be competing in the new Young Audiences category at Annecy. It has already been honoured at the Berlin Festival, where it received a Special Mention from the Children’s Jury in the Generation Kplus Competition, and will be contending in three categories at Animafest. All four of the filmmakers will be accompanying their films to Annecy.
The Annecy Festival will also be the venue for the much-awaited launch of Comic Strip Chronicles, a quartet of animated short films that celebrates the affinities between comic books and animated films. The four films are directed by five acclaimed cartoonists from Canada and France: Guy Delisle, Zviane, Aude Picault, Lewis Trondheim and Jean Matthieu Tanguy. These films will be presented in special screenings throughout the festival, with Guy Delisle and Lewis Trondheim in attendance.
In the out-of-competition program VR@Annecy, Blind Vaysha, an acclaimed film by Theodore Ushev that has travelled the world and been nominated for an Oscar, will be presented for the very first time in the form of an immersive virtual-reality experience.
The Annecy Festival will also be holding a retrospective on the work of Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, who will be on hand to present a master class on stop-motion animation. There will also be screenings of five of the films that they have produced with the NFB: Madame Tutli-Putli, Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must Be More to Life, and their three films from the NFB’s Naked Island series—We Eat Shit, We Drink Too Much and Saint-Louis Square.
Lastly, four animated shorts from the NFB will be presented out of competition in special screenings: La Bastringue Madame Bolduc and Words by George Geertsen, along with La faim by Peter Foldès and Old Orchard Beach P.Q. by Michèle Cournoyer.
We are going to use V.R :)