Festivals are wonderful places to discover the like-minded and the like-minded wannabes. The debut of the Brisbane Animation Festival, cheekily entitled Celluloid Briefs, drew the vibrant Queensland animation community and the lovers of animation to revel in two days of flickering projected images. And, it appears from the success of this first time out, it will be, as the organizers have promised, a biennial event.

Brisbane, a city of about one and a half million has a surprisingly active animation group. With 260 members in the Queensland Animators Group, the organization is certainly on the cutting edge of the Australian animation scene. After last year's loud, spectacular and cacophonic Kaboom exhibition curated by Philip Brophy at the Sydney Powerhouse Museum, the Brisbane setting and its festival offered a much more theatrical exhibition of international animation. The subtropical environment fulfilled its promise by keeping the general feel of the festival unpretentious, relaxed and accommodating to both the cognoscenti and the newly initiated. The Schonell Theatre, located on the idyllic grounds of the University of Queensland, was the comfortable site of the Festival where the usual crowd of about 200 attended most of the sessions on offer.

Short Filled Sessions
The weekend was organized into five sessions filled with shorts. What made the festival somewhat differently focused was that several of these sessions were guest curated by television producers and executives involved in showcasing animation. Clare Kitson, Head of Animation at the United Kingdom's Channel 4, and Joy Toma, executive producer of the experimental showcase Eat Carpet program from the Australian Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), were two of the invited special presenters. The festival thus provided an insight into the locations where independent productions may be commissioned, or at the very least exhibited to the largest audiences.

The Saturday "matinee" session, Kids' Stuff, curated by Dina Browne (from the Festival of Australian Television), featured a retrospective of recent animation from Europe, Canada and Australia. Particularly impressive were the celebrated and endearing Barbro Hallstom's Mr. Bohm and the Herring (Sweden), the computer-animated and mesmerizing Pencil Dance and Michèle Cournoyer's emotively promotional An Artist (Canada). The naive style of Trace Balla's Hungary-to-Australia immigration saga, Lilly and the Yellow Cake, was a compelling, simple story. Featured in the selection was the Australian children's international animation showcase program Babble-on from SBS.