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.

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.

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.

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.

Another fine year for OIAF. Another bad year for the Ottawa culinary scene.

By Dan Sarto

There are a number of things I can always count on at an Ottawa festival. First, I will find myself defending Chris Robinson and the selection process. Second, I will find myself defending Chris Robinson and the selection process with people whom earlier in conversation I had defended Chris Robinson and the selection process.  Third, after watching several days of screenings, I will question Chris Robinson’s selection process.  Nothing ever changes.  I love it.

The festival brings together everything uniquely interesting about the animation industry.  Art, commerce, tattoos, the best and worst of kids cartoons, unintelligible films from Asia, alcohol, great student films and big studios walking hand in hand with little studios,  agreeing they'll refrain from poaching talent except at the parties. The Ottawa festival brings together big and small, have and have not, legend and newbie together in a unique way - cozy, intimate, unpretentious, inviting.  The care that goes into its planning is always evident – from the programming of retrospectives to the variety of master classes and talks, nothing on the schedule seems out of place and each holds its own against the other.  It’s tough to arbitrate the constant decision making surrounding what to do and when.  Suffice to say, days and nights are always full and I travel home lamenting all I didn’t get a chance to see or do.

Some final observations on the 5 day fest, in no particular order and really, to be honest, displaying limited insight:

The shorts jury, led by Jan Pinkava, hands out the big prizes.

By Dan Sarto

Another OIAF Grand Prix gets awarded, another Phil Mulloy feature takes top prize, another grumbling voice can be heard complaining about the winners.  Much like the start of Ontario’s moose hunting season, which I watched in awe Sunday on a TV at the back of a bar, as the Nelvana Grand Prix is announced, second-guessing the judging season once again begins in the province.  Hopefully, you won’t see too many animators hanging upside down, suspended from a crane over the bloody bed of a pickup truck.  But you never know.

A fine display of design and carving skills. The rest are posers. Except the guy with the pumpkin speedo.

By Dan Sarto

The Animator’s Picnic is inspired event programming – stop all proceedings, go to a park, eat, drink, see and be seen.  Find old friends, meet new friends.  On this unseasonably beautiful Autumn day, as I gaze out on the crowd of young animators, the future of our industry, I can’t help but think…I feel so old. Nothing like a large gathering of energetic young hipsters, free from the burdens of metabolic decline and hearing loss, to remind you just what a sorry-ass geez you are.  The crowd gets younger, the walk to the Bytowne Cinema gets longer and no amount of Advil or Scotch can change that.  Sometimes I wonder, if I start talking to a young female animation student, am I perceived as someone who has something useful to say, or just a perve?  Can one be both?

Check out a selection of pictures from this year’s picnic and pumpkin carving contest…

Picture of the Don't Take Pictures screen before the Dead But Not Buried screening.

By Dan Sarto

I know it must be Ottawa Animation Festival time because it’s been roughly a year since my last verbal manhandling by an airport customs agent. Happy Anniversary! I seem to be a magnet for every disaffected flak vested agent looking to brush up on their 12-step time mismanagement drill.  My path through customs at the Ottawa airport was no different this year.  It must be my Vans.  The checkerboard pattern is on some secret watch list.  Or, maybe it’s because I’m Jewish.  Despite my feeble compliance, I couldn’t help but wonder if, sans sidearm, multiple 13 round clips, taser, pepper spray and truncheon, this fellow dissecting my passport was any match for me.  Yah, my ego whispered, I could take him.  If I wanted to.  But I don’t want to.  Lucky for him. And so starts my 2011 visit to Ottawa.

A Lost and Found Box of Human Sensation

By Dan Sarto.

No other festival I’m aware of consistently generates as much controversy as does the Ottawa Festival. People may scratch their heads at the judging decisions in Annecy (insert favorite French joke here), but in Ottawa, beer-fueled grumbling and incessant whining are as much a part of the annual festivities as head-scratching competition screening introductions and the cavalcade of toothless panhandlers lining Rue Rideau.

Despite the umbrage some people take with the selection process, the competition this year at Ottawa by and large was relatively solid.  It has taken years, but I’ve finally learned the difference between films I don’t like and those I consider just plain “bad.”  I’m still amazed at how often my thoughts on films differ wildly from those of friends and colleagues whose opinions I otherwise respect. For every screening I leave thinking “That was a pretty strong program,” I hear someone exiting the theatre lobby muttering under their breath about the “unbelievably shitty films” they’d just seen.  Such is festival life. Indeed, such is life.

The prizes in waiting.

By Dan Sarto.

The closing ceremonies bring an end to another Ottawa International Animation Festival.  And while I await my connecting flight in Newark for the final leg of my journey home, I linger just a bit longer on the images in my mind of all the wonderous activities of the past week.  Though I was constantly too warm or utterly frozen and could never get comfortable wearing layers and a heavy jacket, I was able to stop griping often enough to have a thoroughly great time.  Here are some images from the closing.