A MONSTER OF A FESTIVAL PART 2

Monstra is a very civilized festival. During the day there were screenings for local school children. At the beginning of the second week competition screenings started, but not until 19h00 (7:00 PM). The seven competition sessions were packed full of such crowd pleasers as The Tale of How by the Black Heart Gang, Ree Treweek, Jannes Hendrikz, and Markus Smit, a trio of South African animators who call themselves a collective and Estonian animators Jellena Girlin and Mari-Liis Bassovskaja’s The Dress. Both of these films have won awards at several major festivals. There were also new treasures to discover, like award winning animator Koji Yamamura’s latest film A Child’s Metaphysics. Koji’s view of the serious business of childhood has both humor and sadness as he deals with the pitfalls and joys of being a child.

An illustrious array from the world of animation also arrived for jury duty at the beginning of the second week. Renowned Portuguese animator Jose Miguel Ribeiro, British animation authority Jayne Pilling, director of the BAA Awards (the bi-annual British Animation Awards), and Igor Prassel, Animateka Ljubljana Program Director and long time co-editor of Stripburger, Slovenia’s only comic magazine were joined by noted Lisbon director Joao Garcao Borges and Chrysanthe Sotiropoulou, Artistic Director of Athens Animafest.

Russia’s renowned Pilot Studio sent two of its beautiful Mountain of Gems series. The audience donned 3-D glasses for Rastko ?iri?’s tribute to Emil Cohl’s Fantasmagorie, which is celebrating its 100^th birthday this year. Lapsus, a humorous tale of a curious nun who ventures into the darker side of her animated world, by Juan Pablo Zaramella of Argentina gave the audience 2 ½ minutes of laughter while Svetlana Filippova’s sensitive Three Love Stories delved into the loves and losses of a poet during the Russian Revolution. So much has already been written about Koji Yamamura’s brilliant Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor that I don’t have any new adjectives to use, suffice it to say that it has garnered top honors at many prestigious festivals on several continents.

I was very honored to be invited to sit on the Student Competition Jury. Joining me were Serbian Renaissance Man Rastko ?iri?, Koji Yamamura, and noted Portuguese journalist Luis Salvado. The Student Competitions had many crowd pleasers. Octopodi by six French students is a tale of two octopi helping each other escape from the grasp of a stubborn restaurant cook who they lead on a very comical chase worthy of the Keystone Cops. German animator Milen Vitanov’s My Happy End has won several Junior Jury and Audience Awards at festivals. This clever story of a dog that chases his own tail and finds his own best friend when he catches it always brings a light moment to screenings.

I also enjoyed Small Birds Singing, Linda McCarthy’s quirky story of a family that lives at the English estate Small Birds Singing, where every day is Monday. How could I not like a puppet film with tiny elephants that dust under tables (I need one of those), arguing apples and a body in the hedge “. . . just another day at Small Birds Singing.” I was first introduced to Linda at the Bradford Animation Festival by Barry Purvis, but it wasn’t until I met her again at Monstra that I realized that her characters were based on a popular British cartoon strip of the same name created by her cousin Steven Appleby. Steve, who accompanied Linda to the festival, is as delightfully droll and witty as his cartoons, which have appeared weekly in the Sun Telegraph and Weekly Guardian in London. He also created Captain Star, the Greatest Hero Any World Has Ever Known, a BBC animated series which achieved cult status in Europe and the United Kingdom.

There were many excellent special screenings and events. The beautiful new Museu Do Oriente (Oriental Art Museum) opened to the public on the first weekend of the festival. Retrospectives of Japanese masters of animation Osamau Tezuka and Koji Yamamura were presented at there. The Museum and Monstra also co-hosted films by such Japanese legends as Miyazaki and Renzo Kinoshita. The East Seen by the West featured films from animators around the world giving a view of Eastern Culture through their eyes.

Several programs comprised of winning films from BAA (British Animation Awards) gave us a look into the wide, refined range of the craft in the United Kingdom. The BAA, founded by Jayne Pilling in 1996 encompasses all forms of British Animation from advertisements and videos to short and feature films. Jayne has recently curated a 6 volume DVD collection, The Best of BAA, as well as a special program, Desires and Sexuality: Animating the Unconscious, which talks about sexuality, fantasies, and desires all subjects that are so perfectly suited to animation.

Monstra is a wonderful opportunity to see Portuguese animation. There were 16 films in the competition alone. Besides the familiar names of Jose Miguel Ribera, Abi Feijo and his wife Regina Pessoa, and Zepe even people in the animation community are not aware of what a rich tradition Portugal has in animation. It is very encouraging to see a new generation of creative film makers emerging. Joana Toste won the Best Film by a Portuguese Animator Award for O Guisado De Galinha, a story of two feuding families who live next door to each other. I am even fonder of Joana’s Caes Marinheiros (Sailor Dogs). Sailors and the sea are an integral part of life in this Iberian Peninsula country so of course they are favorite topics for animation, but Joana gives us an entirely new twist in this odd tale of two worldly dogs who keep a sailor to tend their garden. A list of all award winners can be found at the end of the article.

Of course not all of the jury’s time was spent deliberating. One night our impeccable host and festival director, Fernando Galrito, took jurors to a fado club. Fernando knocked on a door with no sign or sound to be detected from the street. A man straight out of the movies opened the door a crack and when he recognized our host we were ushered into a packed room. This was no tourist spot but the real thing. The singing, food and wine were superb.

Lisbon has a new state of the art bullring which was very near our hotel. Underneath the ring is a very high end shopping center complete with gourmet market. One store had a foot and a half high man stuck through with knives in its window. Somehow this knife holder seemed very ironic in a shop under the bull ring. Late one night Nik and I returned to our hotel to find two victorious blood splattered matadors in the lobby. Of course, I couldn’t resist having my photo taken with them.

Lisbon is a very walkable city with seven hills like San Francisco and Rome as well as a half sized replica of the Golden Gate Bridge over the Rio Teijo (Tagres River) and trolley cars going up and down the hills. One afternoon Nik, Rastko ?iri? and I walked all over town with a stop at the Leonardo Di Vinci museum. From there we went to a little café in a park that is home to a museum located in an old underground water reservoir.

After two weeks in Lisbon I really began to feel at home, but all good things must come to an end. At the awards ceremony the Student Competition Jury paid homage to two of our members. Before announcing our selection all four of us donned our 3-D glasses that were used for Rastko’s film and then placed a cherry on each of our heads to symbolize Mt. Head.

Every night there was music and a party in the theatre café but for the last night a group of us retired to Rastko’s hotel room with appropriate libations and Rastko played his guitar and sang. None of knew that Koji was an excellent guitarist until he picked it up and started playing. This evening was a truly memorable ending to a very memorable festival.

A big thank you goes to Fernando Galrito and his very hard working staff who went far beyond the call of duty to do everything possible to make all of us feel welcome and handle the multitude of problems that so many guests have throughout a 12 day festival. Anyone who has the opportunity to attend Monstra shouldn’t even think twice before accepting this wonderful opportunity to participate in an amazing event.

COMPETITION RESULTS

JURY: Rasto Ciric, Koji Yamamura, Luis Salvado, and Nancy Denney-Phelps

BEST STUDENT FILM ($1,500 Donated by the Portuguese Youth Institute)

LIFE LINE – Tomek Ducki, Hungary

HONORABLE MENTION

MOVING STILL – Santiago Caicedo, France

TWENTY QUESTIONS – Nuno Costa, Portugal

WEISS – Florian Grolig, Germany

JURY: Jose Miguel Ribeiro, Igor Prassel, Jayne Pilling, Chrysanthe Sotiropoulou, and Joao Garcao Borges

BEST TELEVISION SHOW (Rites to purchase the show by National television Donated by Short Wave)

A CHILD’S METAPHYSICS – Koji Yamamura, Japan

REFRAINS – Wiola Sowa, Poland