I Castelli Animati set up camp once again at the Cinema Modernissimo in Genzano. All festival photographs by Jon Hofferman. Catalog cover © 2000 DreamWorks, Pathe and Aardman.

It was a dark and stormy night, and the days weren’t much better, but the unusually inclement Italian weather couldn’t dampen the high spirits and cheerful camaraderie of the animation festival-cum-love fest that is I Castelli Animati. Now in its eighth year, artistic director Luca Raffaelli’s freewheeling and intimate gathering celebrating the best in animated film again boasted a smorgasbord of diverse works, as well as special guests, educational activities and much good feeling.

As in previous years, all of the films were presented in one theater, the charming Cinema Modernissimo, located on a small side street of the equally charming Comune di Genzano di Roma. Situated within genuflecting distance of the Pope’s summer residence in Castelgandolfo, Genzano lies in the hills about 30 km south of Rome, as picturesque a setting as one may wish. (However, given the fact that one spends 95% of one’s time in a dark theater watching images projected on a screen, it wouldn’t make much difference if the festival were held in the catacombs. However, the food is better in Genzano.) Once again, the many thematic threads that comprise the festival’s offerings — the international, Italian, Web and Videotecnica competitions; individual filmmaker homages; an out-of-competition showcase; and TV series, pilots and specials — were presented in an integrated format that made for pleasantly varied viewing.

The festival opened on Wednesday afternoon, November 26, with the first films of the International Competition — the Russian Krasnie Vorota Rasemon (The Red Gates of Rashomon) and The Stone Of Folly from Canada (which, coincidentally, would go on to win the award for Best First Film) — and the initial offerings from the fecund minds at Aardman Animations, whose co-founder, Peter (“Chicken-Man”) Lord, was one of those being honored with retrospectives. There were also presentations by representatives of animation programs at a number of Italian schools, and by Georges Sifianos and François Darrasse of the Ecole National Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in Paris.

The schools’ presentations were part of a larger program, new to this year’s festival, which was designed to give students and faculty from the Italian and French schools a chance to look at each others’ work and compare their respective methods and goals. The intention, as Luca Raffaelli explained in the festival catalog, was to explore the central issue of whether the schools should be “training professionals who know how to settle into the work of a studio, or try[ing] to cultivate the qualities of each student, hoping that his or her capabilities might find the best way to professional success.” These thorny issues were to be explored in two seminars in the coming days.

Cameras Take Five was named Best Non-Narrative Film. © 2003 Steven Woloshen.

Following Wednesday’s traditional leisurely dinner break (not to be confused with the traditional leisurely lunch break, which takes place several hours earlier), the evening’s program started out on a high note with a screening of Guido Manuli’s typically deranged Opera. Manuli, a major force at Bruno Bozzetto’s studio before beginning his solo career in 1979, was another one of the filmmakers being honored with a retrospective homage this year. Manuli’s been called “the Italian Tex Avery,” and indeed his films display the same manic energy that characterized Avery’s work, and the two animators share a predilection for reductio ad absurdum and wacky surrealism. While Manuli’s films aren’t always to my taste (due at least in part to my not sharing what seems to be a general European enthusiasm for, say, fart jokes), the best of them can be very funny and one can’t help but admire an artist willing to follow his id wherever it leads.

Also of note at the first night’s screenings was Stepan Koval’s understated and very lovely clay animation, Ishov Tramvay #9/The Tram #9 Goes, which somewhat surprisingly didn’t win a prize, and Stephen Woloshen’s McLarenesque Cameras Take Five, which did. The evening closed with Nick Park’s The Wrong Trousers, the second of the Wallace & Gromit films, the droll humor of which nicely bookended the frenetic lunacy of Opera.