Barry Purves' Achilles. © 1998 Bare Boards Productions/Channel 4.

The Winner: Children's Books
This year's awards leaned heavily on innovative drawing-based animation inspired by children's books. The Golden Pulcinella for the best program went to L'Enfant au Grelot, translated into the banal-sounding Charlie's Christmas. This same program of muted gouache and pastel drawings with Klee-like backgrounds won "best special" at the Annecy Festival last year. Though the story is fairly predictable Christmas fare, there are times when the art takes over entirely and lends a uniquely magical atmosphere to the tale. The team of Jacques-Remy Girerd (writer, director, producer), along with designers Damien Louche-Pellisier and Benoit Chieux, deserve credit for sticking to the virtues of their elegant, consciously two-dimensional design.

The winner of the Silver Pulcinella for the best TV film Eugenio was also a French production of a similar stripe. The virtues of the original children's book by Lorenzo Mattotti have been maintained: looping curvy characters and surreal imagery on a palate of bright reds and oranges which contrast against a dark and mystical background. Again, the situation is simple: a clown loses his laugh. Though the issue would never be in doubt when presented in traditional animation styles, the weird pacing and imagery, as well as a page-turn animation technique create a tension all their own.

An English entry, The Bear featured a similar fidelity to the artwork of the children's book on which it was based. In this case, it won director Hilary Aldus a direction award for following the original pastel drawings of Raymond Briggs' book. The result was a shimmering technique, which lent a dream-like atmosphere to a polar bear's visit to a girl's home.

L’Enfant au Grelot.

In The End...
In the end, the kids had their say. In the final awards presentation, jury member Enzo D'Alò spoke about the importance of the message in the animation industry. "There must be something that inspires a doubt," D'Alò declared. He was seconded by Bruno Bozzetto. "Something must remain," Bozzetto affirmed.

The children, as if to underscore this message, gave a special award to Robby London, one of the producers of Our Friend Martin. This 62-minute special on the life of Martin Luther King, a combination of live-action and animation, was what they found most inspirational. The pre-teen angst of Disney's Doug also seemed to capture the children's hearts; they awarded another special prize to creators Jim Jenkins and David Campbell.

All of this cross-pollination between children and professionals, artists and audience, reality and imagination, is wonderful. Yet, the very intimacy of the Positano venue may lead to its extinction.

For RAI, the payoff is the live television feed of the awards ceremony, complete with outdoor stage for the obligatory singing pop artists to add a bit of prime-time Italian style to the events. This year it was greatly scaled back "due to the war." Even more awkward are the logistics of the situation: one of the great mysteries of this year's festival is how production trucks were ever navigated through the impossible streets of this tiny and tortuous fishing village. On the last day of the festival, organizer Alfie Bastianich was reluctantly admitting that next year, the festival may move to the larger town of Amalfi, farther down the coast. Well, it'll still be cartoons on the bay, only it may be a bigger bay.

Russell Bekins is a disgruntled expatriate of the film industry, now living in Bologna, Italy. Serving his apprenticeship as story and multimedia analyst for Creative Artists Agency, he went on to be a creative executive for Tidewater Entertainment at Disney Studios, where he achieved his level of incompetence in studio politics. He is now working on theme park attractions and consulting on multi-media projects, as well as struggling with the subjunctive tense in Italian.