Mornings and afternoon sessions featured guest speakers, while the evenings were given over to screenings. The opening presentation by West Surrey College of Art and Design's Roger Noake examined the interrelationship of art, technology and communication by presenting personal projects and sponsored work of animators from Len Lye and Oscar Fischinger to the present day. The tradition of public service or commercial work sponsoring more experimental animation continues in films by people like the Brothers Quay, Marjut Rimmenen and David Anderson in England, according to Roger.

This was followed by Albert Schafer, a manager at Studio-TV-Film in Berlin, who showed examples of television series and documentaries using animation to educate children in Europe about environmental issues. Focusing on works like The Bamboo Bears or Albert Says Nature Knows Best, Schafer surveyed German animation's "green scene."

Animator Dani Montano from Dimensions in Manila presented an eclectic survey of animation from the Phillipines, Indonesia, India and China, ranging from public service films on the virtues of birth control and dangers of AIDS to children's parables. The tension between expressing local cultures, and the financial lure of filmmaking for international markets was graphically illustrated by the broad variety of films shown.

The Cage, Animata. Courtesy of the Singapore Animation Fiesta.

Local Production
Local production was presented through an exhibition of work from Animata Productions, Garman Animation Studios and Temasek Polytechnic. The student films were imaginative, demonstrating that the limited resources of a newly-established animation program at Temasek are not barriers to creativity. K. Subramaniam of Animata spoke about how he and his associates have tried to develop their skills by increasingly ambitious projects. Subra showed his short animated study of an old man's loneliness, The Cage, which won the Special Jury Award in the Singapore Short Film Competition, and an excerpt from Singapore's first animated feature-length film Life of Buddha, which has become a strong seller in Asian video markets. The session closed with an enjoyably quirky lecture by Garman Herigstad, who discussed his experiences animating in Asian countries, displayed a showreel of his computer animation, and ended with an exhibition of his guitar collection!

Saturday evening consisted of programs devoted to Japan and Canada. The Japanese program presented Isao Takahata's classic Tombstone for Fireflies (Grave of the Fireflies), a tale of the fate of teenaged Seita and his four-year-old sister Setsuko in the last months of World War II in Kobe, Japan, and one of the few films that invariably cause me to weep. The Canadian program featured recent National Film Board productions, including Cordell Barker's The Cat Came Back, Paul Driessen's The End of the World in Four Seasons and Caroline Leaf's Two Sisters. Singapore has fairly rigid censorship standards. While the films shown in the Fiesta received an educational exemption, movies depicting nudity were pushing the envelope as far as local norms go. This became apparent during the screening of Snowden and Fine's Bob's Birthday. When the morose Bob appeared naked from the waist down, the audience first gasped and then came out with the longest sustained laughter (continuing through Bob's "Elephant Dance") that I have ever heard.

The final day began with a survey of Japanese animation by Sayoko Kinoshita, director of the International Animation Festival in Hiroshima. Sayoko presented a demo reel of the 5th Hiroshima Festival along with some of her and her husband Renzo Kinoshita's own work, including Made in Japan, and the more recent Hiroshima, which deals with the nuclear bombing. Speaking in Singapore, a country that suffered terribly under Japanese occupation, Sayoko reflected on Japan's responsibility for the war in a moving moment for the speaker and the audience.