The animation exhibit at Lucerne. All images courtesy of Marcin Gizycki.

When a few years ago Otto Alder announced that he would step down as the head of the animated film program at the DOK film festival in Leipzig, Germany, to devote himself to academic work in Lucerne, Switzerland, everybody who knew him could be sure that sooner or later this beautiful town in the Alps would become an important place on the map of international animation events. And so it happened.

On Dec. 8, 2009, the Lucerne International Animation Academy, an initiative of Otto Alder and the Faculty of Design at the Lucerne School of Art of Design, was officially opened. This intriguing name hides in fact a combination of an academic symposium, a discussion forum allowing practicing animators to share secrets of their craft with other filmmakers, and a display window for artists' work. As Otto, the head of the LIAA, put it in a statement printed in the catalogue: "The LIAA, located at the interface between theory and practice, has set itself the goal of nurturing and deepening the dialogue on animation."

In contrast to another big conference that had taken place in Changchun, China, a few weeks earlier, the Lucerne meeting was an informal, low key event, despite its loaded program and an impressive list of speakers. According to the LIAA website, the main theme of the debates had been specified as the role of dramaturgy in animation, although the spectrum of subjects discussed was actually much broader. In fact, the schedule was so busy and overlapping that everybody had to find his or her own way through it, picking up some presentations and leaving others aside. This writer, for example, decided to skip his compatriot Jerzy Kucia's conversation with Gil Alkabetz, in favor of Normand Roger's presentation of films he had written music to, etc., etc. Obviously one person could not attend all the lectures, screenings and discussions, so everybody's impression of the event has to be slightly different. Fortunately, nothing competed with the very first speeches of the Academy's opening night: Yuri Norstein's splendid lecture on the importance of poetry in animation and the Quay Brothers' revealing talk about the role of music in their films.

Yuri Norstein talks about subtlety as poetry.

According to Norstein, poetry lies in subtle nuances rather than mastery of the craft. It is more about following one's instincts, looking for the right intonation, listening to the inner voice than going along well-trodden paths. In his second speech, that took place the next day, Norstein disclosed some secrets of his amazing animation technique and produced on the spot his famous mist effect.

The Quays talked about how music had always stimulated their imagery. They work with their composers in an unusual way: the score comes first, the images and movement follow. The conversation between the twins and Suzanne Buchan focused mainly on In Absentia, the film that they had made to Karlheinz Stockhausen's music. When the composer saw the film for the first time, thought that it had been inspired by the life-story of his mother, which the filmmakers had not known. This is apparently the power of following one's intuition.