A highlight from the competition was Pauline Pinson's Aided Migration from France. This humorous take on migration won the SWR Audience Award.

Andreas Hykade's animation, The Runt (Germany, 2006, 10 min.), is a powerful tale of a boy and his pet blue rabbit, "Wanna eat them gotta kill them!" It explores the human condition of being a carnivore, simplified in story and visuals to its violent essence by stylized drawings and use of primary emotive colors. The film forms the third of a triptych of Hykade's short animations, which are currently showing at a retrospective of his films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Eva M. Toth's animation Laika's Memory (Hungary, 2005, 4 min.) is one of the few non-figurative abstract films in the programs, being animated improvisations using calligraphic lines, marks and patterns, which are animated to minimalist music.

Pauline Pinson's Aided Migration (France, 2006, 4:33 min.) is a humorous take on migration where we find an assortment of migratory birds traveling to their new summer locations in an airplane, and the film uses traditional cel animation with a stylized cartoon look. This animation won the SWR Audience Award.

Vladimir Leschiov's Lost in Snow (Latvia, 2007, 7:50 min.) is a nicely paced and constructed animation about being lost on drifting ice and fishing. It portrays a sense of human hopelessness in a philosophical way.

Michaela Pavlatova's Carnival of Animals (Czech Republic, 2006, 12 min.) is an unusually striking animation described as an animated musical erotic fantasy. It explores variations on the theme from male and female perspectives set to the wonderful music of Camille Saint-Saens. It uses cel animation techniques with the look of colorful pastel drawings in varied visual styles.

Adriaan Lokman's Forecast (The Netherlands, 2006, 10 min.) is a mesmerizing computer animation taking one on a journey into a beautiful world of clouds, which transform in a myriad of multicolored and mysterious ways. It's great to see on a large cinema screen, yet one would like to be completely immersed in this supernatural atmosphere. Everyone sees it slightly differently.

Jeu (Switzerland/Canada, 2006, 3:51min.) by the animation master George Schwizgebel explores shapes, figures and movement around sound. It's described as a visual and musical game, which expands and contracts to the rhythm of the Scherzo from Serge Prokofiev's Concerto No. 2, and the animation reverses at the end as the soundtrack rewinds.

This year, the festival's prestigious Grand Prix was awarded to La memoria dei cani (The Memories of Dogs), directed and produced by the animator Simone Massi.

Grand Prix
This year, the festival's prestigious Grand Prix was awarded to La memoria dei cani (The Memories of Dogs), 8 min., Italy/France 2006, directed and produced by the animator Simone Massi.

The film utilizes animated drawing on paper in black and white, where areas of cross-hatching lend texture, as well as a nervous animated energy. Strong compositions with contrasting fields of light and dark initially lead us through a landscape with a dog toward a farmhouse and into its interior, as if seen through memory. There is a subtle ambiguity between images used as metaphor or narrative, which makes the telling of the story dreamlike. Via the movement and progression through the landscape and time, the boy's painful experience is re-lived.

The jury statement reads, "With minimalistic means this film poetically deals with human suffering and dignity, together with high-level design and artistic intensity. The jury wishes that the filmmaker will continue his artistic development and make more beautiful films."

Massi studied animated cinema at the famous Urbino Fine Arts School, which is established since more than 100 years and has an animation department since about 50 years. The filmmaker has previously created 15 short animated films that have been exhibited in one-man shows in Europe and have won several awards. After screening La Memoria dei cani at the Hiroshima international animation festival, the Stuttgart Grand Prix is the first award for this film.

At the closing night filmmakers party, well after midnight at the Festival Lounge, finally it's possible to ask the main winner directly, how does he feel about receiving the Grand Prix? Massi says emphatically that "It's such a great compliment," particularly in the context of the other films in competition, which are very good, and he adds, especially in the context of the jury members whom he greatly admires. The filmmaker says that the award is very important for him not just in terms of money but also to become known and to find a producer for his next animation.

Flashback to the day before. I had the opportunity to talk to the well known animation director Regina Pessoa (Porto, Portugal) a member of the Jury for the international competition. Her animation work has won the Grand Prix Award at Annecy 2006, was nominated for the Cartoon d'Or and short-listed for the Oscar nominations, amongst winning more than 30 other international awards.