This young girl seems to be enjoying her time at Anima Mundi. All photos courtesy of Philippe Moins.

If there’s one animation festival that succeeds in attracting a really enormous audience, it must be Anima Mundi in Brazil. This year they broke their own record with 88,000 admissions over a 15-day period. This edition ran from July 11-29, first in Rio de Janeiro and then in Sao Paulo.

The first thing that strikes you upon arrival at the festival is the extraordinary youthfulness of the audience. Anima Mundi is a popular event that, in both cities, attracts an enormous number of teenagers and children to screenings, workshops offering opportunities to try their hand at making animation, and the “animated chats.” These encounters with professional animators are extremely successful, enabling audiences to talk with foreign filmmakers about their work. This year’s lineup included Janet Perlman, Phil Mulloy, Doug Sweetland from Pixar, Koji Yamamura and Arnaldo Galvao, who were inundated with questions.
 

Young adults (left) at work in one of the workshops. Filmmaker Philip Mulloy (right) was a guest of the “animated chats” in Rio.

When asked to explain what attracts such enormous numbers of young people, filmmaker Marcos Magalhaes, who is also one of the festival’s four co-organizers, cites both low ticket prices and the festival’s work over a period of several years to encourage young audiences to discover animation, and to demystify the process of animation filmmaking through the workshops. The festival also has a hugely effective marketing strategy, supported by the festival’s sponsors, making Anima Mundi a recognizable and highly visible brand, both in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. On the streets in Copacabana you see bus shelters sporting the festival logo, whilst in Sao Paulo huge advertising billboards carry the Anima Mundi logo. Apparently there is good print and broadcast media coverage, even if this has not yet led to any television programming that happens outside the festival period.

Philippe Leclercq, director of Rain Children, Koji Yamamura and Katrin Arndt from the Institut of Animation, Visual Effects and Digital Postproduction at Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttembe

The result of this activism on behalf of animation is a high number of entries. This year, the festival received 500 films from 39 different countries, from which they selected 300+ for competition, and around 60 of these were Brazilian. A hugely impressive number, no doubt rather too many, as even the festival organizers seemed to feel. Doubtless more rigorous selection would make the programs more interesting, but apparently the Brazilian public does not mind since the films are offered such an exhaustive panorama of world production.

Anima Mundi’s approach to organizing their competition is quite different from that of any other festival. There is no jury, with prizes being chosen by the audience and local professionals, through a kind of representative voting system. The audience votes at every screening, as they do at Annecy. What is truly original in Anima Mundi’s case is that several prizes are awarded (i.e. first, second and third in each category: shorts, video, children’s, etc.), reflecting the votes cast. In addition, audiences in each city award their own prizes. In effect, the results in both Rio and Sao Paolo tend to be pretty similar. The drawback of any audience award is that voting generally favors funny and playful films, although the selection provides a wide range of other kinds of animation.