All images courtesy of Future Film Festival.

Bologna, Town of Students, Tortellini and Cartoons
Bologna, a town comprised of 370,000 inhabitants in the northern part of Italy, is well known because it has the oldest university in the world, established in 1088, two famous towers from the XII Century, called Garisenda and Asinelli, old churches and ancient palaces and because you can try some of the famous tortellini, the pasta stuffed with ham, meat and parmesan cheese, and usually cooked in hot beef bouillon. But for the last nine years, Bologna is well known also because every year in January fans of cartoons and blockbusters throughout Italy gather for the Future Film Festival, dedicated to animation and visual effects and directed by Giulietta Fara and Oscar Cosulich. This year we were treated to unusually hot weather, a quasi-spring, due, no doubt, to the change in climate that worries Al Gore as well as many scientists around the world. The program contained several previews, such as Arthur and the Minimoys (aka Arthur and the Invisibles), Charlotte's Web and various other animated films coming from Japan and Europe; then there were a number of open meetings with professionals from the animation and vfx industry, and some noteworthy retrospective screenings.

Silvia Pompei, character animator at Film Roman.

Grand Opening and Other Previews
The opening of the festival was celebrated with a special event: a meeting with Silvia Pompei, character animator at Film Roman, who showed the delighted audience some glimpses of the long awaited The Simpsons Movie, (including a colorful shot of a crowd Springfield citizens that is very angry with Homer, as usual). "We are still working on animation, and it's a continuous work in progress, because writers change the story every week," said Pompei, while showing an interesting documentary with interviews conducted with the director David Silverman and other artists at Film Roman. She couldn't reveal anything about the plot, but explained the main differences between the TV series and the movie: "The movie will be in CinemaScope ratio, so this means a great opportunity for animators to fill this new space with characters and jokes, but it represents also a challenge in storytelling, because in the series gags often play on the sudden reveal of what's off-screen, which is very hard to choreograph within a wider screen. So we used the trick of using the upper and lower part of the screen and also the third dimension, meaning that often something is hidden behind objects. The movie will present also a richer and wider color palette and also shadows on characters, and despite being presented as a 2D movie, it will use a lot of 3D animation, very useful for artists, but invisible to moviegoers."

Apart from the screening of Arthur and the Minimoys by Luc Besson, followed by an interesting meeting with French visual effects supervisor Geoffrey Niquet, the audience seemed to like other previews. Two movies demonstrated the richness of Danish animation: the drama Princess by Anders Morgenthaler is an adult story about a man on a search for a vengeance against the owner of a porn movie company that caused the death of his sister and the confining of his niece to an orphanage. It's a touching movie that showed the potential of animation to explore genres other than animation, and contained an interesting mix of animation, used here for dramatic flashbacks. Then, The Ugly Duckling and Me by Michael Hegner and Karsten Kiilerich, updated the well known Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, with the story of an ugly duckling adopted by a greedy mouse that wants to exploit him as a freak at carnival shows. A fresh and humorous comedy, demonstrating, as Pixar has taught us, that story and characters are far most important than the quality of graphics.

It was also very entertaining to watch The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, the new Japanese movie directed by Mamoru Hosoda from Mad House. It tells the story of a teenage girl that travels through time, mainly going back in an attempt to fix events and mistakes and causing lots of trouble. It's a hilarious movie, with well crafted characters and a life lesson about the consequences of our choices. Other well received previews were Renaissance by Christian Volckman, with its outstanding black-and-white imagery made with the rotoscoping of real actors, and Astérix et les Vikings, by Jesper Møller and Stefan Fjeldmark, with the amusing adventures in Scandinavia of the famous duo, Astérix and Obélix, created by Goscinny and Uderzo. This is one of those rare series enriched by the use of 3D animation, in addition to traditional 2D.