After taking last year off, Animated Encounters returned stronger than ever for a four-day run.

To answer the main question on the lips of animation fans regarding the Bristol International Animation Festival — no, special guest Jeffery Katzenberg did not take the opportunity to do any juicy dissing of Michael Eisner, Disney’s (ostensibly) outgoing ceo. The most the DreamWorks Animation honcho would offer in that direction was a light-hearted admission of why he helped establish a brand-new Hollywood studio. Namely, “I got fired!” he said.

The fifth “Animated Encounters” Bristol festival may not have had any great shocks or revelations, but it was a solidly mounted event, making a welcome return after a hiatus last year when the venue — Bristol’s “Watershed” arts’ center — underwent refurbishment. After a somewhat squeezed three-day event in 2003, it was back up to four days this year, a Thursday to a Sunday. Thursday and Friday were the “Industry Days,” with participants able to choose between two parallel strands of panels, talks and networking lunches, before the main festival and screenings kicked off on Friday evening.

The Katzenberg items effectively bridged the industry and populist sides, with Katzenberg in conversation with David Sproxton, co-founder of Aardman Animation, on Friday afternoon, then picking his favorite cartoon moments in the festival’s traditional “Desert Island Flicks” that evening. He showed scant sign of his fearsome reputation as a hard-nosed Hollywood mover and shaker, being soft-spoken and courteous throughout the event, though not without an edge of polished sly humor.

During a daylong appearance, DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg didn’t diss Eisner, denied that 2D was dead and picked his Desert Island flicks.

Some of Katzenberg’s material was familiar, but he took the opportunity to deny saying 2D was dead, claiming it simply needed to be reinvented and citing the “I want’ song” (with which Katzenberg was once associated) as an example of outmoded formula. He nominated Sylvain Chomet’s French The Triplets of Belleville as a “fresh and original” piece of 2D, and admitted he liked South Park. Asked by an audience member about Disney’s offbeat Lilo & Stitch, Katzenberg said he enjoyed it, finding it “very charming.”

But there’s no doubt where Katzenberg’s own preferences lie. On DreamWorks’ next CGI projects, he noted the animal-oriented Madagascar would “push deeper into territory unique to animation,” as would upcoming DreamWorks films like next year’s Over the Hedge. However, he said DreamWorks was already committing to movies (due round 2009) that would head into other territory. Like Pixar’s The Incredibles, they would tell stories that one could imagine working in live-action, “but not as we’ve done them.”

This writer took the opportunity to ask Katzenberg if he still tensed at the word “cartoon” being used to describe a film like Shrek. (Interviewed promoting Shrek at Cannes, Katzenberg was quoted as saying the word placed cartoons “into a little ghetto called children’s stories.”) Katzenberg said no: he had once felt the word was pejorative, with connotations of Saturday mornings, but he was now proud to call Madagascar “the cartooniest CGI film to date,” with character rigs allowing for more squash-and-stretch.

On the future of CGI, Katzenberg predicted a “migration into 3D without glasses.” (A scene from DreamWorks’ 3D Shrek was shown at Animated Encounters three years ago, though the film was never finished.) The new Pope’s election prompted Katzenberg to recall how he showed Prince of Egypt at the Vatican to an assembly of cardinals. Afterwards, he debated the film’s Old Testament theology with them. “It was as nutty as anything in my lifetime,” he said, stressing he was still proud of Prince.

A few hours after the IMAX talk, Katzenberg moved into the Watershed Centre for “Desert Island Flicks.” The interviewer was Mark Kermode, a British film critic well known for insisting that The Exorcist is the greatest film ever. Katzenberg presumably had no idea of this, but when Kermode got misty-eyed and metaphysical about Mary Poppins, the guest took the cue to rib Kermode to the audience’s great enjoyment.