Claude Cloutier’s ‘Carface’ Wins at 2015 Sommets du cinéma d’animation
MONTREAL -- Carface (Autos Portraits) by Claude Cloutier, a short produced by Julie Roy for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), won the Prix Guy-L.-Coté Best Canadian Animation Film at the 2015 Sommets du cinéma d’animation on Sunday. The Festival ran from November 25-29 in Montreal.
The film has made the shortlist of 10 works in consideration for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, along with another NFB production, Cordell Barker’s If I Was God. The five nominees will be announced on January 14.
Carface is the seventh short film by Claude Cloutier, whose 2007 film, Sleeping Betty, won a Genie, a Jutra, and more than 20 other awards around the world. It was the opening film of the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois (RVCQ) and was in official competition at the prestigious Annecy Animation Film Festival as well as the Ottawa International Animation Festival.
Billed as a scathing musical-comedy satire about the power of Big Oil, in which cars perform a song-and-dance number while the planet slides toward ruin, the five-minute Carface is produced by Julie Roy for the NFB.
Cloutier first gained fame as a comic-book artist with the series La légende des Jean-Guy and Gilles la Jungle contre Méchant-Man. He went on to make several animated films, including The Persistent Peddler (1988; in competition at Cannes), Overdose (1994), From the Big Bang to Tuesday Morning (2000), Sleeping Betty (2007; some 20 awards), The Trenches (2010) and Interférence (2014).