The Society for Animation Studies (SAS) held its 9th conference in Utrecht in the Netherlands from the October 8-12. This was the second time the conference was held in Europe and actually only the third time it has been arranged outside of the U.S. For the SAS to become truly international, the conference in Utrecht was a major step to include more European scholars. Hopefully, it will come back to Europe in two or three years time and maybe even institutions in Australia, Asia or Latin-America will be future SAS conference organizers.

Utrecht was in many ways an ideal site for the conference. The beautiful city dates back to a Roman settlement in the year 48 A.D.. In the Middle Ages, Utrecht was a major Dutch city. With its canals, old impressive churches and beautiful small streets, a walk around the ancient town center is a really interesting and pleasant cultural experience. As an university town, Utrecht is the oldest in the Netherlands. Utrecht University is the largest in the country with 25,000 students. Both Utrecht University and Vrije Univeriteit Amsterdam were coordinators of the SAS event, but the principal SAS contact and the main organizers were Ton Crone and his colleagues at the Nederlands Institute for Animation Film. The aim of this national institute is to reinforce and broaden the infrastructure of animation films in the Netherlands. As such, they really demonstrated their qualifications and skills by holding a very well organized conference.

Opening Night
On the first night, the conference was opened in the beautiful aula (main hall) of the Utrecht University by Stevijn van Heusden, Head of the Arts Department in the Ministry for Education, Culture and Science. This leading Dutch cultural politician gave an informed and, it seemed, personally inspired speech about animation and the state of the art. Apart from the French Cultural Minister Jacques Lang, who spoke about animation in Annecy some years ago, I have never heard a politician on such a high level speak about our art form from such a personally involved viewpoint. Unfortunately, the follow up presentation that was probably meant to be a highlight of the conference, did not live up to its expectations. Professor Nadia Thalmann was introduced as the world expert on the development of computer animation. She took us through an "Overview of the State of the Art in Human Figure Modeling Animation." She showed examples of the work from her studio/laboratory in Geneva, but neither Marilyn Monroe or the other clips she showed particularly impressed me. A virtual tennis match between two players - one placed in Geneva, the other in Zürich - was a fascinating technical experiment of real-time motion caption control, but as animation, the performance was a disappointment. However, the reception afterwards was excellent! So was the conference dinner party, and the 't Hoogt Film Theater, where most meals were taken, was a great meeting place.

An International Retreat
More than 100 participants from 16 nations illustrates both the popularity and geographical variety among the animation scholars. There were participants from Australia, Canada, Iran, Israel, Japan, the U.S. and several European countries, including Russia and Ukraine. Even though I met several translators the first day of the festival, I never heard them work. The conference was open to papers presented in both French and German, but only Philippe Moins (Belgium) presented his paper in French, and all of us had written English translations for his presentation. The only French panelist, Pierre Floquet, chose to present his paper on Tex Avery in fluent English. I believe our SAS association has a very long way to go before it becomes bilingual. Maybe it never will, but I believe that if we want to attract our French speaking colleagues, it probably has to.