Clouds and cowboys

The festival in Annecy opened with recognition of the primacy of Russian animation

Although animation has become one of the biggest money-makers in the entertainment industry over the past few years, there is nothing more democratic than cartoon festivals, where there is basically no star system and celebrities mingle with a fun-loving young audience. At the already 33rd festival in the French town of Annecy (a kind of animated analogue of Cannes), everything is as always: the halls are filled with student youth, with laughter and hoots flying airplanes at the screen, you can’t get through the festival center - a multilingual man is sitting on the floor and steps people, studying thick catalogs and exchanging opinions on what they saw, while Plympton, Schwitzgebel, the directors of the studios Pixar, Aardman, and other great ones calmly walk around, and no one cares about them.

There are hundreds of animation festivals in the world, each with its own specifics: some show children's films, others show TV series, and others specialize in new technologies. Annecy in this row seems to be the most diverse and omnivorous, but it also has its own preferences: despite the competitions for feature-length, commercial, television and other films, the most important thing here is short films, and viewers from all over the world come here precisely to see what's new in original animation. However, Annecy art director Serge Bromberg always saves something special for the opening. This time the festival began with a Russian theme: it was solemnly announced that the French genius Emile Cohl is no longer the author of the world's first cartoon, and the pioneer of animation is the Russian dancer and choreographer Alexander Shiryaev, and in confirmation, a fragment from a documentary film about him was shown.

The next surprise was the premiere of a new short film from the Pixar studio - “Cloudy in Parts”. Pixar always shoot their famous small films, which often win Oscars and other prestigious awards, as an exploration of new possibilities in 3D animation, and then use their findings in commercial feature films. It seems that the cute children's film "Cloudy in Parts", where it turns out that clouds hand out babies for delivery to storks, is an occasion to conjure up the image of a fluffy texture. Indeed, “living” swirling clouds with funny faces, anxiously working on the creation of children of all breeds, are not at all cottony, but rather light, like clouds, very soft and fluffy in appearance.

Well, the main number of the opening program was the advance premiere of the full-length film based on the cult TV series “Town of Panic” in France. At the turn of the 2000s, this tongue-in-cheek and deliberately primitive series had already won numerous awards. For him, two young Belgians came up with a paradoxical and absurd world, inhabited by tiny plastic characters on stands - the kind that are sold for pennies in toy stores to “populate” toy farms and railway stations. At first they didn’t even do anything with these figures; they were always in the same pose and moved very funny. Now the dolls have begun to change: in the foyer of the festival center there is even an exhibition “Panics”, where each character is shown in dozens of poses, but the type of “soldiers” has been preserved. How preserved are the main characters living in the same house: the adult intellectual Horse and two idiots with the behavior of teenagers - the brutal Indian (you should have seen how he blow-dries his feather headdress!) and the feminine Cowboy. The film, where the Indian and the Cowboy decide what to give the Horse for his birthday, and, as usual, turn everything around into chaos and horror, has not become anything fundamentally new - this is just another sprawling, but truly funny and paradoxical series that fans will encounter with delight, but it has nothing to do at the box office (at least in Russia).

Based on the first two days of competition, which overwhelmed the diligent festival visitor with a mountain of short films, it is still difficult to say anything definite about the favorites and the most likely candidates for prizes. Although, of course, the ovation that the audience gave to the director of the three-dimensional puppet fairy tale “Coraline,” Henry Selick (who directed “The Nightmare Before Christmas” with Burton), says something. But let's not get ahead of things. There is still a large part of the festival ahead.

Dina GODER