The theater (above), the Internet café, and two restaurants serve as home base for I Castelli Animati attendees. Photo credit: Jon Hofferman.

I can’t think of a better place for anyone who loves animation or creates animation to be than the I Castelli Animati festival in Genzano, Italy during the first week of December.

“It’s a small festival with big names,” said Paul Bush, the London-based filmmaker perhaps best known for his scratch animation, The Albatross, and, more recently, his experiments with animated films created with time-lapse photography. On the other side of the lobby, I could see Aardman Animations’ co-founder Peter Lord sitting next to his wife, and Danish animation legend Borge Ring’s white hair and beard as he walked outside with his wife.

“Some festivals insist on premieres,” Bush said. “It’s ludicrous. It makes them less of an animation festival. Here, the most interesting thing is the program and the guests. And there are lots of guests.”

Indeed, festival director Luca Raffaeli estimated that 20% of the festival’s attendees were guests, with 50% animation fans from Rome and 30% from elsewhere in Italy.

I traveled from Rome to Genzano in a small van with four other festival attendees: journalist Tsvika Oren and his wife and young daughter from Tel Aviv, and Annick Tennige, director of the school la Poudriere in Valence, France and former AWN general manager.

As the highway unrolled south of Rome, the countryside turned rural and hilly, and the road narrowed into two lanes. We drove alongside horses in small pastures, past vineyards and underneath arches made by pine tree branches stretching across the road. A sign pointed to a castle in Gandolfo, but we turned in another direction and rounded a lake instead. Later, I’d learn that the castle was the Pope’s summer palace built on the foundation of a Roman emperor’s villa. The Castelli Romani area of Italy, which is only about 20 miles from Rome, has long been a summer playground for Romans who enjoy its bucolic volcanic hills and mirror-like crater lakes. Genzano hugs the rim of a crater with one such lake.

With a few hours free before the festival began, Annick and I explored the old part of the village that winds between a grand palace, a medieval church and the crater’s rim. Inside the rim, dark Lake Nemo reflected the amber, rust and dark green leaves of the autumnal forest growing up the crater’s sides. The weather was drizzly. Rainwater glazed the narrow cobblestone streets and splattered the yellow buildings. Laundry hanging from the windows was draped with plastic sheets. We heard a woman singing.

Peter Lord sits with his wife while he draws a picture of Wallace and Gromit for some lucky fan at I Castelli Animati. Courtesy of Barbara Robertson.

Near the church, next to an Internet café, we discovered a small building with a Castelli Animati sign on the front. Inside, two men were wiping clean several rows of blue plastic chairs facing a small stage. Neither Annick nor I had been to Genzano, or to Castelli Animati. We counted the chairs, looked at each other and said, “This will be a very small festival.”

We stopped for an espresso and hot chocolate and then continued exploring, walking past stores selling sausage, cheese and Genzano’s famous bread. In many of the shop windows, we saw Castelli Animati posters. When we went back to the festival building, no one was there and the chairs now sat around small tables. One of the men laughed and told us this building was for the children’s part of the festival, which began later. He sent us to a movie theater across the way and down another cobblestone street. The theater, the Internet café, and two restaurants would be our home for the largest part of the next four days.

We checked in at the lobby, opened the doorway into the theater and walked into complete blackness. Annick put her hands out in front of her, I put one hand on her shoulder and we moved forward like the singers the Blind Boys of Alabama walking onto a stage. When her hands reached the heavy curtains, she pushed through and we saw Castelli Animati’s director Luca Raffaeli standing in front of a large movie screen, introducing the first set of films. His children, a three-year-old sprite named Rosita and his son, six-year-old Jocomo, danced around his legs.