Each year thousands of animation professionals from all over the globe fly to Annecy, France to attend the Annecy International Animation Festival. Over the years, the festival has developed the reputation of being the premiere animation festival in the world. This year’s event, which ran from June 2–7, 2003, was no exception. We wanted to find out why others enjoy the festival and find it an important event to attend each year. Our pool of responses came from filmmakers, historians, festival directors, educators and execs. Here is what they had to say.

John Dilworth at work at his Stretch Films. Photo courtesy of Stretch Films.

John Dilworth, director and designer, Stretch Films
Academy Award-nominated director John R. Dilworth is the founder of New York-based Stretch Films and the creator of Cartoon Network’s Courage the Cowardly Dog. The pilot for that series, The Chicken from Outer Space, was nominated for an Academy Award, an Annie Award and a CableACE Award. Dilworth has also directed such short films as The Dirty Birdy, Noodles & Nedd, Catch of the Day and The Mousochist.

My most positive Annecy moment was the restoration of hope that hand drawn animation will survive, with intensive care, with the feature film, Les Triplettes de Belleville. Also discovering new souls. It is important to me to attend the festival for the continuity of community, inspiration and contagious enthusiasm. The networking I do at the festival is all human, which includes, naturally, business interests and creative. I am mostly interested in how well people live and love within the context of their art and commerce. For me, to network is to insert myself in this net that works like the weave of a blanket. I cannot discriminate against the quality of the films. I was satisfied with my colleagues’ difficult selection choices seeking the best of the best. I resist judgment.

Animation historian Giannalberto Bendazzi. Photo courtesy of Giannalberto Bendazzi.

Giannalberto Bendazzi, animation historian
Italian born Bendazzi is a film critic and historian who has been studying animation since age 19. His most recent work is a book in English and French called Alexeieff – Itinerary of a Master, devoted to a master of auteur and experimental short film. His best known work is Cartoons, One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation (Indiana University Press, 1994, 1995, 1999), a world history of the medium that has been in the making since 1970.

My most positive Annecy experience was realizing that my colleagues on the jury were the best group of civilized, cultivated and expert people I could hope for. They were Bill Plympton (USA), Gabor Csupo (USA), Mikhail Aldashin (Russia) and Susie Campbell (Australia). The quality of the films to award were above average, and this was my second most positive experience.

I'm a historian, and at a festival like Annecy, I can watch a good selection of every year's best animated films of the world. I attend the retrospectives. I can also meet the filmmakers. If I were a filmmaker, a distributor, a professional of any kind, I'd do the same and I'd feel enriched anyway.

The quality of the films has changed a lot during the years, and this is an extremely exciting and inspiring thing. I don't mean the level of the quality, I mean its morphology. During the seventies animators were presenting novelties: new techniques, new design approaches and new sound inventions. During the eighties the basic theme was issues (the emblem film of the eighties was nature-loving The Man Who Planted Trees by Frederick Back, Canada). Then came electronic development. But you see, when I first arrived in Annecy, in 1971, I happened to hear this comment: "This year's selection is quite weak... Do you remember how great it was the one before?". Now, 32 years later, you can hear the same thing told by almost everybody in the festival hall. And this means that, in fact, the level of the quality, despite its morphology, has always been perfectly high.