Jonas Odell, creator of Never Like the First Time, and Ian Gouldstone, creator of Guy101.

Why is this? You guessed it — they’re having fun. Robinson chooses his films wisely, picking more flawed, but interesting films over “quality,” saccharine, paint-by-number pieces. Unlike me, who loved Andreas Hykade’s The Runt, which deals with dark issues of life and death in a brutally truthful manner, others may have said it wasn’t “fun” watching the film, but its power is undeniable as many attendees did have fun discussing films like it at the parties afterward. It’s inspiring to sit in a theater with a crowd of animation fans and mark the varied reactions.

The universal laughter at Journey into the Disney Vault, which brilliantly satirized the Mouse House, to the way the edgy subject matter of Ian Gouldstone’s Guy101 sneaks up on the audience completely quieting the crowd, is compelling. No matter what area of animation one finds themselves in, the competition shorts exemplify the wide range of what animation can be.

Interestingly I found that three of the retrospectives, which showcased the work of Konstantin Bronzit, Bob Clampett and Bruno Bozzetto, highlighted a question that I heard many ask during the event — where’s the funny films? I also think the juries’ decision to award top prizes to comedies like Joanna Quinn’s Dreams & Desires: Family Ties, Obom’s Here and There and Michaela Pavlatova’s The Carnival of the Animals points out this thirst for laughs as well. However, it is not the festival that’s creating this thirst. The festival’s humorous retrospectives show that it is not biased toward dark and disturbing material over comedy.

There were also comedies in several of the out of competition screenings, but none of them made me wonder why they were not in competition. They just weren’t as out and out funny as Bronzit’s At the Ends of the Earth or Clampett’s Wabbit Twouble or Bozetto’s Europe and Italy. In our own part of the animation world, is our obsessions with flow charts or existential experiments or figuring out how to render our project and not crash all the computers within a six-mile radius made us loss our funny bone and intelligent wit?

Cartoon Network’s Heather Kenyon (middle) having a lively conversation with a group of animators.

Ottawa allows us to witness and contemplate these trends and ideas. Maybe, someone seeing the works of Bronzit, Clampett and Bozetto will be inspired to make the next great comedic masterpiece, whether the medium be Flash on the Internet or a TV series on a major network or a five-minute short done with clay puppets in a filmmaker’s home studio. Or maybe someone will just see the thought-provoking subject matter of darker films like Odell’s Never Like the First Time or Run Wrake’s Rabbit and be inspired to tackle the same issues, but only from a more humorous approach?

During the Q&A after his retrospective, Bozetto was asked if he had worked a menial factory job before, because he deals with the subject often in his films. He said he hadn’t. However, this subject strikes me as a core issue to everyone in the animation community, because we’re all to some degree avoiding those menial factory jobs by working in entertainment. Throughout the year we get caught up in the business of living and working in animation and might forget that it’s far better than various (fill in the blank) jobs. It takes events like Ottawa where we can be inspired in various different ways and talk with people that share the common love of creating or just enjoying “the illusion of life” to remind us why we do what we do. When people are having fun, they’re going to be more creative, which, in the end, is good for our business.

That’s why Ottawa is an “important industry event.” But, come on folks, let’s finally admit to ourselves that dirty secret for going — it’s fun to watch animation — it’s what got us into animation in the first place.

Rick DeMott is the managing editor of Animation World Network. In his free time, he works as an animation writer for television. His work on the new series, Growing Up Creepie, can be seen on Discovery Kids. Previously, he held various production and management positions in the entertainment industry. He is a contributor to the book Animation Art as well as the humor, absurdist and surrealist short story website Unloosen.