**Festival d'Annecy 2018** by [@CasualEffects](http://casual-effects.com) 2018 June 24 The Annecy International Animated Film Festival is the world's oldest and largest recurring animated film festival (and a terrific rolling European art-party scene). This article describes some of my favorite films screened this year. See also my [Annecy 2016](http://casual-effects.blogspot.com/2016/06/annecy-2016.html) and previous writeups for past years. The 2018 festival had a very strong lineup of short films, which are the heart of the event. Programs 1-3 in competition were all terrific, 4 was watchable, and only the fifth session did I find undesirably weak. I liked the commissioned and student graduation shorts almost uniformly, and there were several good feature films including two of special note below. [John Morena](https://vimeo.com/johnmorena) was one of the stars of the show. I enjoy his very short films as amusements but don't teach or rave about them; however, the consistency with which he produces good animation is staggering and he had three shorts shown in competition this year (from the 52 he produced last year!)  _Incredibles 2_ from Pixar, directed by Brad Bird, premiered on the Friday of the festival. It is a worthy sequel to one of Pixar's best, and good standalone film on its own--this is definitely one of the best films you'll see in theatres this summer. Jack-Jack is the breakout star character and Holly Hunter, Catherine Keener, and Brad Bird (playing a female character) deliver especially fantastic performances. It brings top notch CGI, voice acting, and a face-paced story. The film's gender and ethnic sensibilities are somewhat mired in the 1950-70's of its characters, which isn't a failure but is a lost opportunity. The central and long flashing-light sequences were the only unpleasant surprise. They are dangerous for those with epilepsy and annoying for everyone else. I was a little too close to the screen and had to close my eyes to avoid a headache and disorientation. Bloeistraat 11 =========================================== [_Bloeistraat 11_](https://vimeo.com/274061645) (10 min, 2018, Belgium and Netherlands) by Nienke Deutz was the best short of the festival and won the Cristal for short film. It is a coming of age story about two female best friends, with plausibly common yet heart-stopping moments. The animation style was fresh: physical sets with hand-drawn animation on stop-motion transparent acrylic cutout silhouettes, which let the characters cast semi-transparent shadows. The camera work and lighting are great, taking advantage of the 2.5D nature of the characters and the 3D set design. This is everything a modern animation should be. My second favorite film of the year, _Gauxuma_, was a nice companion piece with similar themes but a more emotionally diffuse story.  Animal Behaviour =========================================== [_Animal Behaviour (Zoothérapie)_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg8y4dKLuWM) (14 min, 2018, Canada) by Alison Snowden and David Fine is punchy, dark humor with a modern cartoon style. A lot of films with anthropomorphized animals miss the opportunity to take advantage of the characters' animal natures--this one leans hard into that while satirizing the group therapy experience. I'd happily watch a whole series on this concept, and it seemed like the rest of the audience agreed.  Guaxuma =========================================== [_Guaxuma_](https://en.unifrance.org/movie/45942/guaxuma ) (15 min, 2018, Brazil) directed by Nara Normande. Mixed media dominated by sand animation biographical film about a young woman growing up and leaving a resort town. Extremely effective through a light touch and use of animation as a lens for memory.  Inanimate =========================================== [_Inanimate_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vitY4_N5xSU) (8 min, 2018, UK) directed by Lucia Bulgheroni is a postmodern story of a stop motion character who appears to have a mental breakdown. The animation is spot-on, creating believably lifelike characters that are simultaneously obviously clay on armatures. It covers a lot of the same territory as _Anomalisa_ (2016), although in my experience from the audience, exceeds that feature film in emotion, clarity, impact, resolution...and beauty, as the main character's visually graceful and striking meeting with "god" in _Inanimate_ is an image that will remain with me for a long time. In a year of many very good student films, this one stood out as a mature execution of a thoughtful script, with technical excellence in some of the trickier sequences. It deservedly won the Jury award for best graduation film. The plot admittedly plays to the jury and festival audience.  Strange Beasts =========================================== [_Strange Beasts_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeGWoh0rUvw) (5 min, 2017, UK) by Magali Barbe was the only short to combine live action with animation. It is a tight story about augmented reality in the mode of one of the less depressing _Black Mirror_ episodes, intially appearing to be a Kickstarter video and then shifting viewpoint. I appreciated that it mostly didn't editorialize about the twist, but instead simply presented a solid sci-fi story and let the audience decide how they felt about it. You may also like Till Nowak's [_The Centrifuge Brain Project_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVeHxUVkW4w) (2013) if you enjoy _Strange Beasts_.  Love He Said =========================================== > "In San Francisco, 1973, Charles Bukowski, the underground poet and punk ahead of his time, > reads his poem "Love" in front of an audience expecting provocation. Instead, he appears > broken and hungry for love." [_Love He Said_](https://vimeo.com/ondemand/lovehesaid) (6 min, 2018, France) directed by Inés Sedan is a passionately rendered charcoal animation of a poetry reading. The behind stage moments and audience response captured in the apparently nonfiction audio give a glimpse of life of the West Coast literate underground in the 1970s--you can smell the smoke, beer, and sweat.  Biciklisti =========================================== [_Biciklisti_](https://vimeo.com/260241437) (7 min, 2018, Croatia and France) by Veljko Popovic was the fun and irreverant sex film of this year's festival. The setting is a bicycle race and the style is children's book pastels, but the content is decidedly more mature.  Agouro =========================================== [_Agouro_](https://vimeo.com/261131330) (15 min, 2018, Portugal and France) directed by David Doutel and Vasco Sa has a beautiful style for fifteen very long minutes. It has the appearance of marker drawings composited over oil paintings and a well-crafted soundtrack.  Happiness =========================================== [_Afterwork_](https://vimeo.com/244405542) (4 min, 2017, UK) by Steve Cutts hits many of the same points as his [_Are You Lost in the World Like Me?_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VASywEuqFd8) (2016) short/Moby music video previously shown at Annecy and others of the genre, but has an absolutely winning moment at the three-minute mark where the animation style flips to underscore one of its main, cynical points.  Travelogue Tel Aviv =========================================== [_Travelogue Tel Aviv_](https://vimeo.com/223252625) (6 min, 2017, Switzerland) by Samuel Patthey is an animated sketchbook from a student's semester in Tel Aviv. It is the kind of classic hand-drawn observational animation without overbearing agenda or narrative that is regrettably rare these days; an artist's delight in the human form, the sounds of regular life, the patterns of architecture, and the many contrasts of a living city.  Ride =========================================== Paul Bush is one of my favorite animators. [_5 Minute Museum_](https://vimeo.com/136519596) (2015) is his strongest film because it combines the joy of stop motion with cultural analysis and reflection on world history. [_Ride_](http://www.paulbushfilms.com/ride.html) (6 min, 2018, Portugal, UK) combines Bush's playful aesthetic with a new level of technical cleverness. The first half of the new film is fun and pretty. The second half is what earned a roar of approval from the audience, when a motorcycle cruises though a sleepy road with the bike changing _every frame_ while the sun, backdrop, and rider remain relatively consistent. As with many Bush films, this reminds me of the core stage and street magician's trick: the magic is simply that the artist spent an unbelievably long time achieving this effect.  Funan ============================================ [_Funan_](http://cineuropa.org/en/video/355869/) (1:24, 2018, Belgium, Cambodia, France, and Luxembourg) directed by Denis Do is a beautiful film in a commerical near-anime style of the personal story of a young woman under the Khmer Rouge and her search for her kidnapped son. It won the Cristal for feature film.  Seder-Masochism ============================================ Nina Paley's [_Sita Sings The Blues_](http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/watch.html) (2008) is a perfect film, brilliantly mashing up playful animation, a feminist retelling of the Hindu epic _Ramayana_, the songs of Annette Hanshaw, and the unravelling of her own marriage. It deservedly won the Annecy Cristal that year, and was subsequently released unconventionally as part of Paley's effective anti-copyright activism. A decade later, Paley premiered her second film at Annecy. [_Seder-Masochism_](http://blog.ninapaley.com/category/seder-masochism/) (1:18, 2018, USA) is even more aggressive than _Sita_, and both more interesting and flawed as a result. Its framing narrative is an animation of an interview with Paley's then-dying father about Passover. The themes are misogyny in the Torah (and the era it describes), the replacement of mother-goddess worship with a patriarchy, and the idiocy of continual conflict over religion and land. The animation is sophisticated and beautiful, with a mixture of 2D patterns, 2.5D scenes, titles, and clever animations of photographed goddess statues.  In this film, the musical numbers all overstay their welcome, but bring an interesting mix of styles and a lot of solid laughs due to some cynical bite. Paley's interactions with her father alternate between poingnant and comic, and are among the highest points of the film. A lot of the film requires some Jewish cultural background to deeply appreciate, and is intended as self-criticism and inside jokes for that community. Unfortunately, the title "Seder-Masochism" is too cute by half; it would more accurately have been titled "Seder-Misogyny", but that breaks the pun. The net thrust of the film is halfway between Sarah Polley and Mel Brooks, but with a feeling of a single director-author in isolation uninfluenced by producers, editors, and actors for better and worse. I found the central theses on track and refreshingly bold, but many of the claims were either unsupported or oversimplified complex modern and ancient histories. This is with regards to Moses, idolatry (e.g., arguably a patriarchical strategy against polytheism and mother goddesses, but the Golden Calf needs a lot of dots connected to defend that), Israel's defense policies and aggression, terrorism, and an elision between circumcision and animal sacrifice. In the final reckoning, it is a film that I can heartily recommend as well as disagree with, which is a responsible place for art to be.