Peter and the Wolf by Susie Templeton won the Cristal and Audience awards this year. But will this 32-minute film, budgeted at more than $2 million, turn a profit? © Breakthru Films.

Peter and the Wolf, one of those shorts that won the Cristal and Audience awards this year, is a winner on any level, except perhaps economically. "I'm very glad that I like the film," says producer Hugh Welchman diplomatically, when asked bluntly as to whether the 32-minute film, five years in production, budgeted at more than $2 million dollars, turned a profit.

Peter and the Wolf follows the musical timing of Prokofiev's piece except for the three minutes of story setup. "Prokofiev's story is quite simple," averred Suzie Templeton in one of the morning coffee with the directors sessions, ably hosted by Bromberg. "I had to fill in the blanks." Most of the story is a ballet between a duck, a cat, a wounded blackbird, a boy, the wolf and two hunters.

The British production was filmed in Poland, and is perhaps the most atmospheric stop-motion ever attempted, full of fascinating details of a rural Russian town. The production designer Jane Morton had done extensive photographic research, and they even looked at criminal booking pictures for the faces. The result was a set that was amazingly detailed, but not very practical for stop-motion animation. "We had to cut holes in the sets for our animators," Templeton laughed. They worked in various scales to get the detail right. A tree where major action takes place was in 1:5 scale, the "garden wall" a patchwork of corrugated metals and wood, was in 1:3 scale.

Still, the most amazing aspect of the film are the closeups of Peter's determined, pouting face. "I had a master model maker," Templeton says. "We spent a lot of time on the eyes, and made veins out of threads." In addition, the animators kept Peter's searching eyes covered with glycerin.

The production company chiefs are now booking the animation for live concerts. They don't seem to have bankrupted themselves, because they are now hard at work, with some of their same Polish collaborators, on their next project, The Lost Town of Siwetz. Well, I guess the system worked for them.

The winner of the Fipresci Award was The Runt, a very simple animation that deals with the very uncomfortable question of raising rabbits for human consumption. To his credit, Andreas Hykade deals with the issue without flinching, in the process, allowing us to examine rituals of male conformity and the ways in which we manipulate children.

It was also clear why The Tale of How won its Special Distinction award. The creation of a very strange and uneasy sea world of birds being eaten to extinction by a giant octopus is alone an accomplishment of narrative. The award, however, clearly means to congratulate the surreal graphics and stylized animation.

Another tour de force from a technical standpoint and of disquieting content was Madame Tutli-Putli, a puppet animation featuring a baggage-laden spinster on a train voyage full of evil presentment. © 2007 National Film Board of Canada.

So what might these winners tell us about a formula for winning? Spend lots of money and time. Be uncompromising about painful facts and issues of human existence. Find a distinctive graphic style and an original narrative. Avoid humor.

Not according to Bromberg.

"Every time I try to do a prediction it doesn't work," sighed Bromberg, seemingly immune to irritating questions. "I never anticipate who is going to win."

No one disputes the quality of films that won, but many were the films of great artistic merit which did not win. Alexandre Petrov, an Oscar-winner for The Old Man and the Sea, concerned to find a market for the elegant shorts he makes, sought out television funding. My Love was made to fit in a half-hour time block, and had financing from a Russian TV network. Perhaps this is a case where an animation was in the wrong category. Petrov's work has long been considered in the "short" category, where innovation and novelty reign. He is a mature artist whose technique is now refined. Had My Love been put in the television category, it would have blown all competition out of the water. But then, would it be fair to compare this multiple year effort with Charlie and Lola?

The festival's programmers ended most of the short programs with their clear favorites, as was the case with Peter and the Wolf (end of program 2) and My Love (end of program 3). The end of program 4, Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor was a 19th century acid trip, full of ravings, distortions squiggles and textures. The former Annecy winner Koji Yamamura has created a masterwork of subjective psychological turmoil of a country doctor who questions the motives of all those around him and has his own motives questioned in turn. As his inner monologue reels onward, the only possible ending is a gesture of madness -- but by that time we are so uncertain of where reality lies that even this gesture could be a figment of paranoid imagination. The end of program 5, Même les pigeons vont au paradis was a classic narrative short about a country priest with a competitive salesman's soul. The priest, with a face from the Italian cleric of the Don Camillo films, had a marvelous expressive quality and the vocalization of the mouth was especially well articulated. The combination of good gags, a pressing time frame and a couple of nice twists led this film to win the Junior Jury award for a short film.

Another tour de force from a technical standpoint and of disquieting content was Madame Tutli-Putli, a puppet animation featuring a baggage-laden spinster on a train voyage full of evil presentment. Directors Chris Lavis and Maciez Szczerbowski have made a figure that provokes wonder for its expressive eyes. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the train is admirably lit, and Ms. Tutli-Putli's fellow passengers seem to have all washed up on the same lonesome shoal of human endeavor. This piece has just won the top prize at the Worldwide Short Film Festival.

Which, we suppose, is the point in the end. Contests, as well as contestants, have their competition. Those who don't win in Annecy can go on to win somewhere else. Somehow, however, it just doesn't seem as regal.

Surprises in Feature films
"We looked at 46 films in five days," admitted selection committee member Thierry Schiel, "It was amazing." The committee ended up selecting nine films for the competition, nearly double the amount normally screened for the festival.

As I was contemplating which films to see, I ran across Dario, 10, an Italian boy, who seemed an ideal target for irritating questions. Which film I should see? He recommended Kahn Kluay, the Thai offering, full of battle scenes, good and evil, mythology, Ice Age-like animals, gorgeous jungle exteriors and romance with a pink elephant. Why? I persisted. "Because it's entertaining," he replied, looking at me as if I were an idiot.