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. 

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.

Nancy at the Cafe Chat

By Nancy Phelps

I had never thought of Peja, Kosovo as an ideal holiday spot but when I was invited to be on the International Jury of Anibar International Festival, the 22nd through the 27th of August, 2012, I discovered how wrong I was.  Peja is a lovely small town of 60,000 people surrounded by a beautiful mountain range known as the Balkan Alps with a lovely stream running through the center of town.  You can take a small motorized train up into the mountains from the town square.

A Heritage Museum is situated in an urban house dating from the 18th century that contains examples of regional clothing, beautifully crafted jewellery, musical instruments, and every day household items from the past.  The town also hosts a large open air market twice a week as well as the oldest mosque in Kosovo and a monastery located in the mountains is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

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.

Tom Wujec presenting at VIEW Conference 2011.  Tom will be back presenting at the 2012 conference.

With topics ranging from fighting robots to animation, product design to sound design, character creation to camera mapping, and game design to storytelling, VIEW 2012 offers professionals and students a remarkable chance to learn from some of the leading directors, animators, artists, storytellers, and designers in the world. Some sessions limit the number of participants, so conference organizers suggest early enrollment to ensure a guaranteed seat.

Tom Hanks as Zachry and Halle Berry as Meronym in Cloud Atlas, distributed domestically by Warner Bros. Pictures and in select international territories. Photo by Jay Maidment.

VIEW conference director Maria Elena Gutierrez has announced that senior visual effects supervisor Dan Glass of Method Studios will give a world premiere presentation on the feature film “Cloud Atlas.” Directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, the Warner Bros. release received a 10-minute standing ovation at its Toronto Film Festival premiere. “Cloud Atlas” is scheduled for wide release beginning in late October.

“We’re thrilled that Dan Glass is coming to Torino to present the visual effects work on this innovative film,” Gutierrez says. “Dan’s brilliant career in visual effects has included supervising work on “Tree of Life,” “Batman Begins,” and the “Matrix” sequels, so he has much to share with us. He joins a stellar list of speakers this year at what promises to be a deeply rewarding conference.”

Other notable additions to the speaker’s list include:

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.

Tomorrow is the final day for the unique CG short film animation training project created by Czech animation education group Anomalia and taught by Arconyx Animation Studio head Kenny Roy. The two week project was part of a summer marathon of animation courses at Anomalia, all taught by experts from top world studios such as Pixar, Valve and Aardman Animations.

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.