German animator Alexander Isert is happy to be at KROK. All images courtesy of Nancy Denney-Phelps.

The KROK International Festival of Animation is my favorite annual event. Each year it is a seagoing experience in which 200 animators from around the world spend 14 days steaming down rivers while watching animation and having the opportunity to make truly lasting friendships. It alternates between being held in Russia and Ukraine. This year participants gathered in Moscow on Aug. 7 at the Dom Kino, home of the Russian Filmmakers Union, for the overnight bus ride to Nizhniy Novgorod. There they boarded the river cruiser Marshall Zhukov to watch animation, eat, drink, to dance under the stars until sunrise, and to have far too much fun!

For several years now professional animators have shown their work in the years the event is held in Ukraine and student films and first professional films compete when the festival is held in Russia. In Ukrainian years the boat is teeming with old friends, filmmakers who are glad to spend time together. This year, unlike some past student years, I met many students who were open and unafraid to approach masters like Yuri Norstein and Edward Nazarov. They were eager to absorb the knowledge that the renowned animators are happy to impart.

Despite my best efforts to arrive on time, I did not join the boat until Aug. 11 in Perm. I missed seeing the first five competition screenings. Luckily, I had the opportunity to watch all of the screenings when I returned to my new home in Gent, Belgium, thanks to a set of DVDs of the competition programs that my friend Ivan Maximov, who was on the selection committee, made for me. I also did not get to see the special program “50 Years of Zagreb Film Studio of Animated Films,” or the retrospective of Natalya Lukhinyh, a friend who was on this year’s selection committee. Since I had been at Annecy this year, I didn’t mind missing the special screening of the 2006 Annecy prizewinning films. My greatest regret was missing the retrospective and master class with Canada’s Jacques Drouin. He was chairman of the international jury and he is the present master of the pinscreen technique invented by Alexander Alexeieff.

It was a privilege to see the tribute to Russia’s Soyuzmultfilm studio honoring its 70^th birthday. Russia’s oldest animation studio has been home to many of the great names in animation and the main training ground for many of today’s leading Russian animators. The program, curated by Natalia Lukinykh, a KROK Festival programmer, film critic and documentary film maker, spanned the history of the studios lustrous career from the One Crime Story (1962) by Fedor Khitrunk and Yri Norstein to Arkadiy Tyurin’s beautiful 25th Day First To and Natalia Lukinykh’s The Old Walls (2003). The Old Walls is from the documentary series “Soyuzmultifilm, Tales and Realities” that covers the history of Russian animation and the masters of the studio through the memories of famous Russian animators.

Among the highlights of the competition was Drawing the Line, by Hyekung Jung from Germany. She was a student of Paul Driessen and this well-executed work is about a man obsessed with drawing lines. He bisects everything that he sees with his pencil and then cuts along the lines. Eventually the only thing left to bisect is himself. Another fine graduation film is Smile by Noam Abta and Yoav Abramovich from Israel. They created a tale of horror using live actors whose faces become animated horrors.

Another of my favorite films at the festival was Doors are Open, a tale of the day in the life of a subway. The cars are made of zippers and the passengers are made of buttons. The last scene is a map of the Russian subway system (which is a wonderful map in reality) laid out in buttons. Anastasia Zhuravleva dedicated her delightful five-minute film to all of the buttons lost in the Moscow subway.

Australian animator Nick Kallincos and Nancy Denney-Phelps relax of the ship’s deck.

Theodore Ushev, a Bulgarian born animator who now lives in Canada, won the grand prize in the First Professional Film Category for Tower Bawher, a whirlwind tour of the work of Russian constructivist architect/artist Vladimir Tatlin. The film’s title refers to Vladimir Tatlin’s tower, conceived in homage to the glory of the proletariat. The movement of this beautiful film draws us continually up towards a utopian summit, but, in the end, all the grandiose, futuristic forms that point to a glowing future winds up crashing under the weight of ideology.

I think that the jury this year did an excellent job. No one ever agrees totally with the selections, but I was very pleased to see the Grand Prize awarded to Overtime. It was not screened at Annecy or Zagreb and so it was my first opportunity to see this impressive work. This graduation film by French animators Oury Atlan, Thibaut Berland and Damien Ferrie brings to life small fabric puppets who find their creator dead at his workbench. They don’t understand what is wrong or what to do. The film combines pathos with humor in a situation that everyone will have to confront at some time in their life.

I was honored to give a master class on the History of Animation Through Music. This program, which my husband Nik and I first presented at the Museum of Film, Television and Animation in Bradford, England, begins with the timeless Hoppin and Gross film, Joie De Vive (1934), and ends with Nina Paley’s brilliant Fetch! The presentation is designed for younger animators who have not had the opportunity to appreciate many of the older, classic animated films. I was very gratified that even though the hour was late, 11:00 pm, following a long day of retrospectives by jury members, I had a very good audience. Even at that late hour there was a 45-minute Q&A session after my presentation, and two students asked for a private session the next day to show me their work. Two other young animators arranged to get together with me in Moscow, so that I could view their work and discuss it with them.