For many years, Brussels has been synonymous with the European Community. The capital of Europe is at the same time a thousand-year-old city with a million inhabitants who live and work there. Brussels is also the site of an animation festival which has developed its special character in the course of 16 successive events.

At the end of the 1970s, you could count on the fingers of one hand the non-Disney animation features that the Belgian public had seen; aside from George Dunning's The Yellow Submarine, René Laloux's Fantastic Planet, the Japanese Bella Donna and the various films of Ralph Bakshi, animation was a very rare commodity in Belgium. It was nonetheless attractive enough for a handful of film fans to have the absurd idea of creating an animation festival, baptized at that time as "Animation Conference."

That was 1982. The first "conference" assembled 1,500 people in a little auditorium of The Capital. The event proved sufficiently important for the association which organized it (The Parascholastic Confederation for Official Education) to decide to make it an annual event.

Since then the festival has been held every year. The name changed from Conference to Animation Week (from 1984 to 1988), then Animation Festival (since 1989). The structure also changed: lodged for a while at an animation studio (Graphoui), since 1989 it has been organized by Folioscope, a nonprofit organization for which the festival is its principal activity. If the festival now attracts an average of 30,000 participants, and is partially decentralized in two other towns (Liège and Ghent), it has kept one essential characteristic from its origins: it appeals above all to the public, before being a rendezvous for professionals.

Cowboys by Phil Mulloy.

A Curious Public
We have often said at the festival that we've been lucky: The people of Brussels demonstrated a fine sense of curiosity, always ready to follow us in our divagations. Not blindly, for they recognized the difference between the wheat and the chaff. But we were always surprised to see how many people crowded in line to see the Quay Brothers, William Kentridge, David Anderson, Caroline Leaf and many others. Forty years of lowest-common-denominator TV (to make a generalization) had not dulled the alert senses of a considerable fringe of the Brussels public, and we were satisfied to know that we contributed to this in our own way. I confess we always mixed, with a pharmacist's care, the big hits, the concessions to popular taste, the new discoveries and . . . the inevitable provocations. Thus, on the opening program of one festival, the films of Phil Mulloy were screened side-by-side with more "polite" fare, and left a very strong impression on those who saw them . . .

The idea that screenings could provoke passionate controversy never bothered us!