Seven of Katzenberg’s picks were features; he excluded DreamWorks, but chose two films he oversaw at Disney. One was Little Mermaid, from which Katzenberg chose the Part of Your World song. He recalled the film went badly over budget, so savings had to be made; Ariel was planned to have 11 colors, reduced to seven at a saving of $750,000 in 1980s money. Intriguingly, Katzenberg mused if Mermaid might have made more money had it come out after the high of Lion King, not a film on Katzenberg’s list.

Katzenberg also picked the ballroom dance scene from Beauty and the Beast, describing it as the moment where the “camera gained wings.” Beyond the 3D, he cited a piece of animation in the scene that had to be reworked three times. “It’s when Belle takes the Beast’s hand and puts it on her hip. You see the generosity on her face, the genuine revelation on his — it’s the key moment, the understanding, ‘I love you.’ It’s the perfect moment.” Katzenberg cited Beauty and the Beast as his favorite animation overall.

From Disney’s Golden Age, Katzenberg picked the climax to Pinocchio, where Monstro chases the puppet and Geppetto on their raft. His other picks included Fantasia, Mary Poppins (the dance with the penguins), the first Toy Story, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and Nick Park’s The Wrong Trousers. Ninth was Chuck Jones’ short One Froggy Evening, while the last pick, undoubtedly personal, was the Coca-Cola advert with the CG polar bears, perhaps reflecting Katzenberg’s love for Diet Coke at brainstorming sessions.

Oscar-winner Chris Landreth talked about the making of his landmark film, Ryan, and reminded attendees that extraordinary CGI effects could be part of a firmly auteur-driven animation. Photo credit: Shira Avni.

Aside from Katzenberg, the other big name at the festival was Chris Landreth, the director of the extraordinary Oscar-winning Ryan, as if to remind us that dazzling CGI effects could be part of a firmly auteur-driven animation. Landreth did a talk on the creation of the landmark film on Thursday afternoon, which, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to see. Needless to say, though, Ryan went down a storm when it was shown as part of the “Inspirational International” strand.

Clare Kitson did an excellent presentation (based on her new book) about an earlier seminal short film, Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales. She spoke lucidly of the film’s deeply autobiographical nature, as well as the oppressive circumstances of its production. It’s no small achievement that one came out of Kitson’s presentation feeling this strange Russian film was finally understandable.

Another “old” film represented, though it would be contentious to call it a classic like Ryan or Tale of Tales, was Ralph Bakshi’s notorious 1974 feature, Coonskin, also known as Streetfight. The film was shown on Friday night in a rare surviving film print (allegedly one of only four remaining). It was certainly fascinating as an experience, though nothing in the sometimes brutishly limited animation matched the biting opening song, Ah’m a Nigger-Man, written by Bakshi himself and sung by Scatman Crothers. For Bakshi novices, it was overwhelming — what we really needed was a talk and discussion supplementing the screening, à la Kitson’s exegesis on Tale of Tales.

The weekend saw a total of eight animated short strands (rounded off by a “Best of” compilation on Sunday evening). There were international and children’s programs, plus two strands representing the U.K., Europe and “Emerging Talent.” It must be said that the ‘Inspirational International’ program rather overshadowed the others, given its classy roster. The CGI titles included Sejong Park’s Birthday Boy, made in Australia, but offering an affectingly vivid childs’-eye portrait of the Korean war; Konstantin Bronzit’s cheeky Russian The God, an excellent exploration of a simple gag; Cherry Clouds, a slight but sweet tale of first love from Japan’s Akane-Maru; and the hilarious Oscar nominee Gopher Broke, which could easily accompany any Pixar feature.

I couldn’t connect to Mike Gabriel’s Disney short Lorenzo, good-looking though it was, but Saddam and Osama, directed by David Wachtenheim and Robert Marianetti, was a bad-taste hoot that successfully poked fun at “classic” Saturday-morning TV.

On the U.K. side, I wasn’t too involved in Fernando Carmo’s 10-minute CGI Hope, premiering here, which seemed a lot of heavy weather over whimsy, but The Unswept Floor by Jane Hubbard was an intelligent idea well-handled, probing backward through a non-descript floor through the ages. Matthew Gravelle’s 2D Taps was a likable sketch summed up by its title, as was Owen Simons’ CGI Mischievous Mirrors. Stalk, by Leigh Hodgkinson, only managed to help fill the festival’s quota for the alienatingly bizarre, but Daniel Greaves’ Little Things was a wonderfully sustained exercise in farcical escalation.