By Ellen Besen

I really thought this next piece was going to be about festival programming but fresh from CTN Expo- which wrapped on Sun Nov 18, I feel compelled to shift focus to a more pressing topic: overall spirit. By this I don’t mean so much the mood of the attendees but more the spirit in which the event was conceived and carried out by the organizers. This last factor has a defining impact on every aspect of the event including the attendees’ mood and programming as well, which is precisely why it is the more pressing issue.

This kind of spirit can be an elusive subject- one that doesn’t really show itself directly.  Instead you kind of have to look at an event sideways, to use your detective skills and also keep in mind what other choices could have been made to suss out the organizers intentions.

Pictured (from left to right): Voice Actor Charles Fleischer and Oscar® winning Director Robert Zemeckis. Image credit: Matt Petit / ©A.M.P.A.S.

By TDK

For those of you who skip to the end of a book, I’ll skip to the question most asked about Who Framed Roger Rabbit  – “what’s happening with the sequel?” Currently there is no sequel in the works. Director Robert Zemeckis acknowledged such on Thursday (April 4^th) at the Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, in Beverly Hills, California on the occasion of a 25^th Anniversary Screening of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Una Furtiva Lagrima by Carlo Vogele

By  Dan Sarto

For some reason, every time I attend the festival in Ottawa, something happens along the way to remind just how fun it can be to visit this last great bastion of politeness and public drunkenness.   This trip was no exception.  Against my better judgment, breaking a solemn vow I made back in 2002, I flew through Toronto.  Back in 2002, the last year of my mullet phase, I was stopped by security at the airport in Toronto and held for close to an hour.  Whether it was my sunny disposition or dreadful hairstyle that put me on someone’s watch list, I’ll never know.  Some junior G-Man barely old enough to shave grilled me for 45 minutes, asking me the same set of questions over and over, as if I’d finally break down sobbing and divulge where Bruce Willis should go to find the nuclear device.   I kept thinking that Chris Robinson was somehow behind the interrogation, because this agent kept going into another room and coming back with more ridiculous questions about animation. It made me chuckle, which made my inquisitor even more annoyed, which probably attributed to the length of the grilling.  However, upon my release, I swore I’d never fly through Toronto again, a vow I upheld until Tuesday.

By Ellen Besen

Social flow is particularly important at animation festivals- we all spend too much time alone at our desks communicating mostly with ourselves and really look forward to the camaraderie 5 days at a festival promises.

All this only made the NAC-less years that much more frustrating. The beauty of the NAC has always been its excellent lobby, a large inviting space big enough to accommodate the market, with plenty of room for productive milling about.  Back in the day, you could count on everyone showing up well before the evening screenings for an unscheduled cocktail party and lingering long after the screening before moving on to other venues. And that meant your chances of seeing everyone you hoped to see through the course of the festival and finding someone worth talking to on any given evening were very high, even for the shyest among the crowd.

The Kosovo/Serbian border

By Nancy Phelps

When I last left you I was on a bus from Pristina, Kosovo headed to Belgrade, Serbia where I was planning to meet my old friend Rastko Ciric and attend the first edition of the Festival of European Student Animation that he had organized.  It was supposed to be a six hour trip.   I knew that Serbia did not recognize Kosovo as a country and people travelling on a Kosovo passport could not cross this border but I had been assured that I would not have a problem since I was travelling on a United States passport.

Image ©2012 Disney/Pixar. All Rights Reserved.

The VIEW Conference has announced the European premiere of Pixar Animation Studios’ latest short film, Partysaurus Rex, to be presented by award-winning director, animator, actor, storyboard artist and writer Mark Walsh.

Walsh graduated from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1997, winning a Student Emmy for his animated short film, Extra Crispy. At Pixar, Mark became part of a group of fellow actors and stuntmen, animating on such films as A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., the animated short Presto, and the Academy Award-winning feature The Incredibles.

By Ellen Besen

What makes an animation festival great?

With OIAF recently past and CTN on the immediate horizon, it seems like a good time to ask this question, one I’ve been asking myself in the aftermath of every festival experience for so many years I’ve lost count. I’ve also lost count of my many attempts to answer that question – most of them quite unsatisfactory.

In fact, I only started to answer the question in any meaningful way when I found myself taking over a sweet little festival- the late, lamented Kalamazoo Animation Festival International (KAFI)- from 2006 to 2009. We were charged, at the time, with taking a promising regional festival to the next level…and in the process of achieving that goal- if only for a moment before the economy, among other things, took the whole enterprise down- a great deal of what really makes a festival work was revealed.

Animation students in formation in front of giant figure from their new animated feature (photo: Bill Dennis)

By Nancy Phelps

Arriving in Changchun, China for The International Animation, Comics, and Games Forum was a very abrupt switch from my previous weeks in Kosovo and Serbia.   Any thoughts of long, leisurely meals with friends and watching good animation went out of my head when I was handed my schedule.

When I last visited the Jilin Industrial Park 2 years ago it was still under construction.  The multilevel media school was completed but I had no idea that that the final project would be so massive.   On this visit all of the tall building were completed and seemed to be full of activity and the grounds were fully landscaped.

First row (L-R) Jerry Beck, Katsuhiro Otomo and Irene Kotlarz. Back row, the CalArts student curators.

By Sean Buckelew and Jess Iglehart

When we traveled to the 2012 Annecy International Animation Festival to present a two-part CalArts Retrospective curated through the class taught by our professor Irene Kotlarz, we expected to bring films back to screen in America, but never did we dream that we would eventually be hosting the legendary animator Katsuhiro Otomo at the new Los Angeles incarnation of the PLATFORM International Animation Festival taking place at REDCAT. 

By Ellen Besen

Festival fever can hit hard - you’re all pent up ready for a good time - and then just as suddenly it’s over…          

OIAF is wrapping up for another year - a good time to consider the best and worst of this venerable festival. Festivals can be addictive with all the ups and downs that word implies - a chance to break and out and party with friends from all over the world - but also an exhausting slog during which you inevitably hit moments where you wonder why you do this year after year. What elements feed these opposing sensations? A whole bunch of details it seems some which change over the years and some which form the traditional foundation of any particular festival.