This year Annecy seemed to have a special atmosphere. Part of what made the seven days so much fun...
An Annecy Full of Memories
This year Annecy seemed to have a special atmosphere. Part of what made the seven days so much fun was that there were so many stop-motion animation films there, both new and old, some of which I had not seen in quite a while. A highlight for me was that after a long hiatus working on his latest stop motion feature film, Adam Elliot returned to Annecy this year with Memoir Of A Snail. The Oscar-winning animator (Harvie Krumpet, 2004) and I have been friends for a long time and I am a huge fan of his films. He lives in Australia so I only get to see him every seven or eight years when he comes to the other side of the world with a new film. It generally takes him eight or nine years to complete one.
When I see one of Adam’s films, I always wonder how he will be able to top this one, and then, to my pleasant surprise, he does. Memoir Of A Snail is an almost perfect film for me. It has everything - humor, sadness, and characters that you care about. It is the story of Grace Pudel who suffers from melancholia. She hoards snails - ornamental snails as well as live ones, along with almost anything else that you can cram into a room. Her life is filled with misfortune, loss, and clutter.
As Grace relates all of the misadventures of her life to her pet garden snail and confidant Sylvia, we learn that her mother died giving birth to her and her twin brother. At a young age, her paraplegic father dies and she and her beloved brother Gilbert become separated and placed in different foster homes 3,000 kilometers apart. Her foster parents are kind, but when they discover nudism, they run off to a nudist camp, leaving Grace alone once more.
Lonely and miserable, Grace retreats more and more into her shell, just like her beloved snails. Luckily for our heroine, an eccentric older woman known as Pinky comes into Grace’s life, taking her under her wing in a nurturing relationship. Later, true to form, Grace’s love life is not what she thinks it to be when it turns out that her hunky fiancé has sinister plans for her. I won’t spoil the end for you by telling you how Grace and her pet snails are finally set free and she finds peace at last.
There is always a cameo appearance in Adam’s films by an actor, sports star, or celebrity. In Memoir Of A Snail, Nick Cave lends his voice to the postman/poet who was Pinky’s first husband. Adam also pays homage to the star of his Oscar-winning film Harvie Krumpet when Harvie makes a cameo appearance in a hot tub scene. Adam told me “I thought that it might be nice to revisit Harvie’s love affair with nudist colonies”. Prickly Springs, where Grace’s foster parents run off to, is the same nudist colony Harvie joined in Harvie Krumpet.
Memoir Of A Snail is a very adult film that proves once again that animation is not just for children. It can deal with adult themes. The film mixes tragedy with humor and humanity. At the end of the first Annecy screening, Adam received a ten-minute standing ovation. The film won a well-deserved Grand Prix Cristal at the festival and I am sure that it will be a hit everywhere that it screens.
Many of his crew came over from Australia for the premier of the film and they had a small private gathering at a local bar. Adam invited Nik and me to join them so we got to meet many of the creative people who worked on the film and hear some very funny stories.
Portugal was the featured country this year which was very fitting since 2024 is the 50th anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. The 1974 peaceful coup, led to the fall of the country’s far-right dictatorship. It is called the Carnation Revolution because masses took to the streets and placed red carnations in the rifle barrels of the soldiers who had been called out to quell the protests The Portuguese booth at MIFA gave out paper red carnations and the stage front was scattered with the flowers for the closing night ceremony to commemorate the event.
BAP Studio in Porto Portugal is well known for the high quality of their work. BAP was created in 2011 as the animation arm of Bando a Parte film production company. The animation studio is a collective of directors, animators, and storytellers who work on each other’s films.
This year at Annecy the studio garnered another honor when two of its founding members, Laura Goncalves and Alexandra Ramires, were awarded the Short Film Cristal for their eleven-and-a-half-minute film Percebes.
The beautiful 2D film with digital and watercolor painting brings Portugal’s Algarve region to life as the film takes us through the complete life cycle of a special shellfish called Percebes, also known as a gooseneck barnacle, from its birth to the dinner table. It is a popular delicacy in Portugal and Spain.
The Algarve is Portugal’s Southernmost region. Until the 1960s the area was primarily known for its fishing villages perched on low cliffs overlooking sandy coves. Once the perfect beaches were discovered the area became filled with expensive villas, hotels, bars, and restaurants to cater to the tourists. Oh progress!
With the sea and urban Algarve as a background, the film evokes the feeling of the people who live in this beautiful location and what life is like in this land caught between tourists and the local people who have lived by the sea and fed their families by fishing for centuries.
Along with the honor of the Short Film Cristal going to Portugal, the official poster for this year’s edition of the festival was created by Portuguese artist/director Regina Pessoa. About the poster Regina said “. . . It was a great honor to be invited to design the festival poster for a second time (she created the 2015 poster), especially as Portugal is this year’s guest country. To create this image, I drew on my deep love for Annecy, for Portugal, and its history, but also the fact that I’m a woman. Hence, a woman is at the heart of the poster’s image as a tribute to them. They are endowed with supernatural powers, these unsung, overshadowed heroines who devote their entire lives to their families. And yet, they still sing and dance. In the clear Annecy Lake waters or in our Portuguese ocean, this woman represents the balance between grace and power in the face of adversity. She is both a swimmer and dancer as she sings in her long dress. A reference to fado, an expression of the balance between exhilaration and solemnity, intertwines with red carnations, a symbol of the democratic revolution celebrating its 50th anniversary this year”. The 2024 Annecy bags were also covered in red carnations.
I first met Martin Smatana in 2017 at the Animarkt Pitching Forum in Lodz, Poland where I am the pitching coach and Martin presented his film project The Kite. The film is a poignant, yet light-hearted, stop-motion film about loss, grief, and renewal as a grandfather explains death to his grandson. Along with winning the first prize at Animarkt, his graduation film won over sixty international awards. It was selected for the semi-finals of the Student Academy Awards, an annual competition for university student filmmakers sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Since then, Martin and I have stayed in touch. In 2021 he and co-director Veronika Zacharova pitched Hello Summer to me at Animarkt. I knew that he had another hit film. In addition to winning the pitching forum’s top award of 2000 Euros, the film also received the Animond Award given by the Animond Investment Fund for Development and Production of Animation.
Hello Summer is a film that the entire family can relate to and enjoy. Using a mixture of stop motion and hand-drawn animation Martin relives his childhood memories of family holidays. A seaside holiday is a big event for a family from an inland country such as Slovakia where Martin is from. Parents often saved for several years for this big event and the entire family had great expectations of the sea, sun, and beaches.
Then the car gets a flat tire on the way, the hotel isn’t quite what was pictured in the brochure, and it rains and rains and rains. As Martin says in the film “The luxury of a vacation is measured more by the precious time a family spends together than the number of swimming pools in a hotel resort”.
The retro French Riviera mood of the film is enhanced by the music. Opening with a lilting waltz, the music moves into the 1960s French hit Douliou Douliou Saint-Tropez (Do you Do you Saint-Tropez) by Raymond Lefebvre and Paul Mauriat. The song captures the holiday spirit perfectly.
Hello Summer won the Young Audience Award at Annecy this year. This is Martin’s second time to win the Young Audience Award. The Kite also received the same award at this prestigious festival in 2019.
Both of the short films that I have just written about were eleven minutes long, and this is something I want to comment about. I have noticed a trend for short films to become longer and longer over the past three or four years. Whereas 5 to 7 minutes used to be the norm now it seems to be 10 to 20 minutes. Even students are making 15-minute films. This trend began during lockdown when people had more time on their hands. People also seem to have forgotten that a good film editor with an understanding of what the animator wants to say is an important ingredient to a successful film.
I sit on several selection committees every year which I enjoy. I also program films. I am seeing longer and longer films with less and less editing. I actually watched a 29-minute 30-second “short “ film. Animators are shooting themselves in the foot making 20-minute films. You can’t show two or three 20-minute films in a program. I must take into consideration how many excellent shorter films could be shown in 20 minutes. A long film has to be much better than good to be programmed; it has to be outstanding. I watch a lot of film and so far this year I have only seen two films that fit that description: Electra by Daria Kashcheeva (27 minutes) and Kaspar Jancis’ Antipolis (26 minutes) and I watch a LOT of films.
With the festival in Zagreb ending late Saturday night, I did not get to Annecy in time for Terry Gilliam’s presentation where he received the Honorary Cristal. Friends who attended it said that he was great. At his talk, he revealed that the reason that he was at the festival was to look for an animator to collaborate with him on his next project which will be a mixture of digital and stop-motion animation.
Over the years, MIFA, the International Film Market arm of the festival has grown and grown. Along with taking over all of the meeting rooms at the Imperial Hotel, there is also a gigantic two-story tent full of exhibitors. MIFA now has a life of its own with people who come just for it and often don’t even get to the Bonlieu, the screening heart of the festival. Along with the exhibitors in the tents, the industry sector of the festival also includes MIFA Pitches, Partners Pitches, and Market Screenings. There are also Conferences, Industry Panels, Press Conferences, Studio Focuses, and Short Film Forums.
A new feature at MIFA this year was an area entirely devoted to XR and gaming content with Digital Experience Pitches WIPXR. There were also XR and Games Conferences as well as Industry Panel Discussions.
Of course, all is not work at Annecy. The parties are the best place to network and catch up with friends. Pouring rain did not put a damper on the opening night party at Chez Ingalls which has now become the hot spot to host your party near the festival center. It has become very expensive (just like everything else in Annecy) to rent a location to host a party, so more and more groups opted for picnics or drink parties in the park this year.
Because there were so many stop-motion animators at the festival, line producer Angela Poschet and producer Melanie Coombs decided to host a non-stop stop-motion celebration in the park. It was a lovely gathering and every stop-motion animator at Annecy was there, I think. As a bonus, you could just stay at the same spot in the park and attend the Republic of Georgia gathering just a couple of hours later.
For many years Shelly Page has hosted a lovely picnic where you can find the “who’s who” of the animation community. The Croatian party is always fun because I get to see many of the people I had just been with the week before in Zagreb. MIYU distribution and production company had a lovely reception at Chez Ingalls and the Stuttgart Festival. The German Film Commission also held their get-together at the restaurant at La Plage near MIFA. The list of parties and receptions goes on and on.
The Saturday picnic that Nik and I host has been going on for over 20 years and has grown from a small group of friends to so many people that I can’t get around to talk to all of them. With all the rain this year, it poured down rain on Friday night and was still drizzling early Saturday morning, and we were a bit worried about whether our picnic would happen or not.
At 10:30 when we went out to claim our spot, there were small lakes all over the grass with ducks swimming in them. Really, that is not a joke. Our regular spot was somehow miraculously almost dry. By noon, when the party officially started, the sun was out and the grass was dry enough to sit on. In all of the years that we have hosted our picnic, it has never been rained out.
I realize that Annecy is LARGE, but it didn’t really hit home until I looked at the figures on the festival website. This year there were 17,400 badge holders. This does not include the 4,120 students and the 6,500 people there exclusively for MIFA. Also, there were 125,000 film submissions from 103 countries.
It is hard to think about anything while I am at Annecy except where I have to be next, but after the festival Nik and I took a leisurely three-day drive across the beautiful French countryside to Limoges where we caught a train home and I had time to reflect on the past week. I realized that I had one of the best times that I have ever had at the festival this year and am looking forward to the 2025 edition, which will be held from 8 – 14 June 2025.
You can find out more about the festival at: annecyfestival.com
Feature Films
Cristal for a Feature Film: Memoir of a Snail
Jury Award: Flow
Paul Grimault Award: Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window
Contrechamp Grand Prix: Sultana's Dream
Contrechamp Jury Award: Living Large
Gan Foundation Award for Distribution: Flow
Audience Award: Flow
Short Films
Cristal for a Short Film: Percebes
Jury Award: The Car That Came Back from the Sea
Alexeïeff – Parker Award: Beautiful Men
Jean-Luc Xiberras Award: for a First Film: [S]
Off-Limits Award: Glass House
Audience Award: Hurikán
TV and commissioned Films
Cristal for a TV Production: The Drifting Guitar
Jury Award for a TV Series: My Life in Versailles "Versailles Ghost"
Jury Award for a TV Special: Lola et le Piano à bruits
Cristal for a Commissioned Film: Pictoplasma "Opener 2023"
Jury Award: for a Commissioned Film: TED-Ed "How Did South African Apartheid Happen, and How Did It Finally End?"
Audience Award: The Drifting Guitar
Graduation Films
Cristal for a Graduation Film: Carrotica
Jury Award: Pubert Jimbob
Lotte Reiniger Award: Maatitel
VR
Cristal for the Best VR Work: Gargoyle Doyle
Special Prizes
City of Annecy Award: The Meatseller
André Martin Award for a French Short Film: Butterfly
Best Original Music Award for a Short Film: Joko
Best Original Music Award for a Feature Film: Flow
Young Audience Award: Hello Summer
CANAL+ Junior Jury Award: Noodles au Naturel
Festivals Connexion Award: Beautiful Men
Festivals Connexion VR Award: Emperor
France TV Award: for a Short Film: The Car That Came Back from the Se
