William Moritz with the Anima Mundi Festival Director, Marcos Magalhães. Courtesy of William Moritz.

The fourth international Anima Mundi animation festival took place in Rio de Janeiro August 16-25, 1996, overlapping a bit with Hiroshima. Unlike the rather hectic pace and nervous business rivalry of the older and bigger festivals, Anima Mundi offers a relaxed and user-friendly atmosphere for discovering and enjoying animation.

Naturally, it is rather hard to separate the event from the city of Rio, which is one of the most dazzling places, with its perfect weather, beautiful beaches, exotic Amazonian fruits and vegetables, romantic 18th and 19th century buildings sandwiched between modern skyscrapers and expansive parks. And the fabulous Carmen Miranda Museum, with her astonishing shoes, jewelry and hats on display together with movie stills and snapshots showing them in their original setting. Carmen's sister Aurora (whose animation credentials include singing and dancing with Donald Duck in Disney's Three Caballeros) regaled us with anecdotes about Walt and Mary Blair staying at the Hotel Gloria (where the festival guests also stayed), and she attended screenings, where she showed good taste by pronouncing Barry Purves' Achilles exquisite.

Guests, Screenings, etc.
The guests at previous Anima Mundi festivals included Frédéric Back, Joan Gratz and Jan Svankmajer. This year, in addition to Barry Purves, with his very hand-made puppet films, a seminar on computer graphics brought Bill and Susan Kroyer, Henry Anderson, Jane Flint DeKoven and Carlos Saldanha (who offered workshops), and portfolio screenings by companies such as Digital Domain, PDI, Pixar and Rhythm & Hues.

Cesar Coelho (Anima Mundi co-director) at Hiroshima '96. Photo by Wendy Jackson.

Screenings are held in four state-of-the-art theaters housed in the Bank of Brazil and Post Office headquarters, large buildings across the street from each other, which also permanently house an arts bookstore, art galleries, a cafe, tea room and a restaurant. The huge lobby of the Bank of Brazil was set up as an animation school, tended by real animation students, where you could try out drawing-on-film or paper, clay modeling, or computer animation and see the results played back on monitors (or in the case of the drawn-on-film, on an "antique" moviola).

One of the galleries displayed the excellent exhibition Animagia, 100 Years of Animation, borrowed from Annecy. It began with an uncanny life-sized automaton of Émile Reynaud projecting his Théâtre Optique of Poor Pierrot in 1892 and included models of most animation techniques (pin-screen, scratch-on-film, paint-on-glass, etc.) up to computer graphics. As a parallel, I presented two two-hour programs of films tracing masterpieces of animation over the last 90 years.