Nancy on the animation couch.

By Nancy Denney-Phelps

The Fredrikstad Animation Festival in Fredrikstad, Norway has an emphasis on screening Nordic animation but offers so much more. Along with Nordic short film and student competitions and screenings of animation aimed at the family audience, two days were devoted to seminars with international guest speakers from all branches of the animation world.

Anyone who is lucky enough to be invited to this wonderful festival should not miss the opportunity. Not only will you have the good fortune to see the best in Nordic/Baltic animation but you will also meet many wonderful people and return home with very special memories.

I first met the organizers of the KLIK Animation Festival at the Annecy Animation Festival a couple of years ago and they assured me that their festival is fun, fun, fun.  When they invited me to Amsterdam to be on the Short Films and Political Animation jury, I jumped at the opportunity and it did turn out to be some serious fun.  KLIK set out to show lots of fantastic animation and organize a great party four years ago.  This year they received 1100 submissions from 63 different countries.  From this field, 235 films were selected for over 30 programs, much more than anyone could possibly hope to see!

Don Hahn is just one of the top

animation pros I ran into.

written by Bill Desowitz

The second day of CTN Expo was overflowing with interest for the informative panels, some of which I couldn't even get into, so I perused the exhibition floor and walked the lobby, making new friends and running into old ones.

For instance, I met Ken Duncan and his colleagues at Duncan Studio, who most recently did the marvelous 2D work on the How to Train Your Dragon Blu-ray/DVD short, Legend of the BoneKnapper Dragon. They told me that they've done breakthrough work on integrating 2D into Maya and are working on making it available to the industry at large in the near future. More on that, to be sure.

I ran into Don Hahn, who mentioned that Tim Burton's Frankenweenie stop-motion feature was progressing well in London (early days so not much to say about the adaptation of the director's popular short other than that it will be in black-and-white and 3-D). Hahn was also pleased about the holiday DVD release of his acclaimed Waking Sleeping Beauty doc from Disney Home Ent. Hahn said that there were some nice bonus features, including deleted scenes.

Then I ran into Chris Wedge, who flew in from New York early that morning for a Q&A later that evening with Bill Kroyer. While Wedge played it close to the vest about his latest, The Legend of the Leaf Men, he positively beamed about Carlos Saldanha's Rio, which Fox releases next year on April 8. He said the animation is nearly complete for this Brazilian feast about two mismatched birds that fall in love (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg and Anne Hathaway) and that the test screenings have been going well. Wedge also said that they've already outgrown their new studio in New York, but that it's great walking to work every day as opposed to the previous commute.

A behind-the-scenes look at Alice in Wonderland was one of the treats of CTN Expo 2010.

The CTN Expo has returned to Burbank for the second year. The conference has expanded a great deal from last year's event. It also has seen an explosion of attendees, which pushed off the scheduled start times of all the events as the eager guest were being registered. This created some bumps along the road for the two-year old event, which is again valiantly put together by Tina Price and her tiny staff with help from a host of volunteers.

Despite its problems, the event once again showed the real reason to attend once you arrived in the panels. First of the day for me was David Schaub, the animation supervisor on ALICE IN WONDERLAND, chronicling the process Sony Pictures Animation went through to develop the mind-bending visual effects of Tim Burton's hit film. Interestingly, the animators had a chance to experiment with the way the characters were to act, ranging from realistic to cartoony. Just goes to show you the leeway a big budget production has to experiment along the way. Burton settled on a stylized realism. In addition to completely animated characters like the White Rabbit, there were many hybrid characters such as the Knave of Hearts. One interesting challenge with that character came in the development of the costume. In all the renditions right up to the start of production, he had a large collar, so for the green screen shoot actor Crispin Glover was given a green suit with a high collar. When the final designs came, there was no collar, so the digital artists had to go in and add digital hair to fill in Glover's long hair that was blocked by the green suit's high collar.

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.

Chris O'Neill - winner of the Festival's Golden Baton Award (l-r), Stephen Beck, Stacey Simmons (director, Red Stick Animation Festival)

Saturday morning. Sitting in P.J.’s, the coffee shop around the corner from the Shaw Center. Except for a handful of sessions today, Red Stick ended Friday night with the awarding of the Golden Baton. The winner (of the three candidates discussed yesterday) was Chris O’Neill’s elegiac (how many times to you get a chance to use that word?) Lilac Wine. Earlier in the fest O’Neill had described his video as the remembrance of loved one who was no longer around, whether via the end of a love affair, or death.

It was an appropriate theme sadly: Red Stick’s annual Lifetime Award was a posthumous one this year, given to DreamWorks and Disney animator Pres Romanillos. Romanillos, responsible for characters like Spirit’s Little Creek, Pocahontas, and Mulan bad guy Hun Shan-Yu, fell to leukemia in July. The collective sense of grief in the room was palpable, with presenter Scott Johnston audibly tearing up when describing Romanillos’ “passion and generosity…he was in touch with something deeper than everyone sees normally.” Glen Keane appeared via video standing in front of Romanillos’ animation table. His sadness was visible too, in an extended, heartfelt (and obviously spontaneous) remembrance of the artist he had mentored, describing Romanillos’ talent and unbridled creativity. (“We had to hold back his desire to detail every drawing – it was like trying to restrain wild horses.”) Romanillos’ widow Jeanine accepted the award in his memory.

written by Joe Strike

Whoops, my bad: what I called Red Stick’s ‘Best of the Fest’ award yesterday is actually their “Golden Baton” prize, and I saw all three films last night. In addition to the music video Lilac Wine, the two other contenders were a Hitchcockian spy spoof (Pigeon: Impossible) and the student effort Blackface, a mystical jungle tale.

While the creators of the first two films (Chris O’Neill and Lucas Martell, respectively) were present, Blackface was represented by Pascal Drzazga (honest to God – he wrote it down so I wouldn’t get it wrong), an instructor from the ESMA (Ecole Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques) animation school in Montpelier France where the film was made.

Stephen Beck (interim director, LSU Center for

computation & Technology) (l) and John Hays (animation

producer, Howl).

written by Joe Strike

I arrive at Baton Rouge’s Belle Hotel, which until April was the Sheraton Baton Rouge. (BR from here on, saves space.) The hotel’s terrible online reviews don’t seem to apply, as the place is actually quite nice. (Wish the internet service was a little more steady, but I’m online now – for the moment…)

Evening comes and Stephen Beck, the current director of Louisiana State University’s Center for Computation and Technology (the Festival’s host) picks me up. We’re heading for the Rave Theater a ways down from BR’s Shaw Center for the Arts, where the Festival is based. Rave? I’m expecting a spontaneous dance party in some empty warehouse, but the Rave is a classy 15-screen multiplex, and they’re about to show Tangled to various invited guests and schoolkids.

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.

You know you've seen too many films when: