Peter Cornwall’s Ward 13 (left) claimed the Audience Prize in the International Competition. Harvie Krumpet continued collecting awards, the latest being the Grand Prize at I Castelli. Ward 13 © Trephine Productions and The Australian Film Commission 2003; Harvie Krumpet © Melodrama Pictures.

The next two mornings, while students and faculty from ENSAD and the Italian schools met across the street, the auditorium of Cinema Modernissimo was taken over by a younger group of animation enthusiasts. In accordance with I Castelli Animati tradition, the first programs on Thursday and Friday became the province of local schoolchildren, whose delighted responses clearly demonstrated their successful indoctrination into the artificial world created by the clever machinations of a handful of social misfits. The screenings included the TV series, Peo in Svizzera, by Fusako Yusaki, offerings from the Disney Channel, and armloads of Aardman, including several episodes of Darren Walsh’s Angry Kid.

The afternoon and evening sessions featured the usual potpourri of programming, with works both profound and puerile. Among Thursday’s highlights: Extn 21, Lizzie Osby’s relentlessly downbeat stop-motion film about the joys of telecommunication; Sarah Watt’s hand-drawn Living With Happiness, which, though marred by a problematic ending, beautifully evoked the extremes of parental anxiety; Woo Jin Lee’s slightly awkward but still effective polemic, Now Who Rules You?; and two gems of succinct storytelling, Kimberly Miner’s Perpetual Motion (a cat, a slice of buttered bread, and voilà), and Paul Bush’s Busby Berkeley’s Tribute to Mae West, an inspired testament to the wonders of anatomy.

The highest points in Friday’s festivities belonged to Aardman Animations, although, given the quality of the works in question, this is hardly a slight against the other films screened. The trifecta of Nick Park’s A Close Shave (possibly the best of the Wallace & Gromit trilogy), Park’s sublime Creature Comforts and Stephen Johnson’s groundbreaking Sledgehammer music video was a hard act to follow. Nonetheless, additional bright spots were provided by two blocks of Manuli works, including Incubus, Casting and the always popular Erection; Peter Cornwell’s very violent and very remarkable stop-motion action film, Ward 13, (which won the Audience Prize in the International Competition); the whimsical clay animation epic, Harvie Krumpet, by Adam Eliot; early works by Ursula Ferrara (see below); and three films in the Italian Competition that would go on to win prizes: Francesco Vecchi’s affecting pixillation film, Ladilui; the very short and apparently very funny (there were translation issues) .Cow, by Marcello Gori; and Jinseok Park’s computer-animated Cyborg saga, GRRNG. Two films by ENSAD’s Georges Sifianos, Odeur de Ville and Tutù, were also screened.

Among the invited guests, undoubtedly the star of the show was Aardman’s ever-gracious Peter (“The Cluckmeister”) Lord, who brought with him a number of plasticine fowl, as well as his older character, Morph. In addition to talking to the audience at length about Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit and other Aardman productions, Lord served as president of the International Competition jury, gave several interviews, and drew chickens for possibly half the population of Genzano. He was joined on the jury by Guido Manuli, renowned comic artist and writer Vittorio Giardino, artist and teacher Marcos Mateu-Mestre and ENSAD’s Sifianos.

The jury for the Italian Competition was headed up by Sifianos’ compatriot, François Darrasse, and filled out by animator/ journalist/ ASIFA Italia president and frequent Bruno Bozzetto collaborator, Giuseppe Maurizio Laganà and a strange large fellow with a sour expression and a big heart, who claimed to have once worked with Paul McCartney. The artist sometimes known as Oscar Grillo, when not heckling Luca Raffaelli or holding forth on any of a hundred different subjects, could usually be found slouched over his drawing pad, giving concrete form to the various demons and angels that inhabit his mercurial mind.

Not in attendance but also the subject of a retrospective homage, Don Hertzfeldt — described by Raffaelli as “that wicked child… [who] shows us the horrible tricks life plays, and enjoys every minute of it” — was represented by such minor masterpieces as Billy’s Balloon (1998) and Rejected (2000). Meanwhile, it was left to Ursula Ferrara, the lone female among this year’s homage subjects, to counterbalance all of the sardonic wit and animated mayhem of Lord, Manuli, and Hertzfeldt with her more insular, abstract style. Seven of her films, reflecting (in Luca’s words) “[an] analysis of her moments in life, her emotions, her memories transformed by emotion,” were screened, accompanied by an exhibition of original drawings, paintings and sketches.