Illustration by Andreas Hykade. Courtesy of Chris J. Robinson.

Let’s be clear about this one: it’s relatively trivial and contrary to what some of you pugs who think all Pimp columns are rants, this one IS a RANT. My turkey? Festival reviews. You know…you see them on AWN or on the ASIFA Website or in ASIFA newsletters or in that Korean mag. Animatoon (Animation Magazine doesn’t even bother w/ festival content). Enough of them, OK?

These reviews are, in general, useless, lazy, so obviously a take work for hire to see my name in print even though I’ve never been to a festival before and didn’t go to half the events. These love letters are getting us nowhere. They don’t help the readers, they don’t help the filmmakers and they don’t help festival organizers. Why is it like this? OK well first off… most of the reviewers are guests of the festival they’re reviewing. They sometimes get travel and hotel, passes and meal tickets covered by the festival. Do you REALLY believe that these folks are going to give a whole-heartedly subjective POV? Who wants to risk not being invited back to a fest?

Two, what they write is usually just cut and pasted from the festival’s own pr material, a grocery list of activities. See… it’s not all that possible to attend EVERY event at a festival so the poor reviewer, already feeling guilty about the fee, hotel, pass and free event snacks, feels they’ve got to cover the whole shebang even if they didn’t attend and what we get is a bland description of the event they didn’t attend under the guise that they did attend. “Trois perspective.” Every animation magazine/newsletter is guilty of this and, YES, I understand WHY. No one has a budget ala BIG newspapers to send a reviewer to cover an animation festival so they must rely on people they know or people they know who know someone who might be going to said festival. The problem is that in some cases they hire inexperienced people — now hold up. I realize that that can be a boon w/ the right person because its good to get the distant/outsider take on our little insular world — but unfortunately most times we don’t get the ‘right’ people so the perspective can be naïve and quite limited.

How are they going to know if, for example, Zagreb is any better or worse if they’ve never been there before? Maybe that doesn’t matter? I dunno. I think it does, Zagreb has a long, rich history. Their organizers are quite passionate and active in the animation world. They travel to festivals, meet filmmakers, generally do what they can do make an interesting festival. You don’t see that effort with a lot of festivals anymore.

(The following is a digression). There are so many damn festivals now being organized by people who have no interest, no connection, no awareness of festival history or culture and are solely creating an event so that they can promote their companies, shallow TV pilots and, heck, maybe they’ll find some Dickens’s kids to exploit along the way.

Reminds me. (Digression #2) I just read a nasty piece in a Toronto paper about the Montreal World Film Festival (big live-action event). Some lady was moaning about the fact that only the public came to the festival AND, get this, that the festival showed too many films by people she’d never heard of. Umm… lady… the VERY point of having festivals in the first place was to showcase neglected, overlooked filmmakers who had few avenues for exhibition to a WIDER audience.

Animation festivals need to remember this. We are not here to lick the toe jam of industry. We exist to introduce new works by new/old voices to new/old viewers. The industry already has exhibition spaces called, umm, the television or the cinema. The industry should be kissing festival toe because w/o festival films, they’d have no one to steal styles from (fortunately, concepts are safe).

My point? The same as always… don’t close the door to the past. Festivals have a history, had a reason for coming into being and you, as a reviewer/attendee/entrant should be aware of such things. And this is precisely why festival reviews need to be a little bit more w/ it. Or maybe you don’t care about such stuff…if not, well, bully for you.