Translated material
Strict selection
International Animation Festival opens in Annecy
Today, the largest and most prestigious animation festival opens in the French city of Annecy. Almost 7 thousand participants, 63 countries, 500 films - full-length and short, original and commercial, drawn in pencil and the latest three-dimensional, archival, documentary, and most importantly, the most recent, many of which date back to 2009.Of course, we are primarily interested in Russian participants in the competition, and there are quite a few of them, since festivals still collect films made last year, that is, before the fall of our animation production. If in 2008 the main Russian participants in the competition were fairy tales from the “Mountain of Gems” by the Pilot studio, now the majority are our graduates. (This nomination always receives especially close attention; this is where famous directors begin, and where world studios recruit workers.) In the program of graduation films there are two classmates who have just graduated from VGIK and have made tender girlish films: Alexandra Lukina (“Mothers and Daughters” - - a light monochrome drawing about a girl sadly repeating the fate of a single mother) and Vera Myakisheva (“Waiting” - an elephant family story, where first the baby elephant is always waiting for his mother from work, and then she, the old one, is waiting for her son will visit). Our third participant in the student competition is the famous comic artist and organizer of the KomMissia festival Khikhus (Pavel Sukhikh), who has recently made several interesting films. His ironic parable about a false reputation, “The Man with the Wind in His Head,” was accepted into the competition. The film was not made as a student (Khikhus did not graduate from film school), but at the base and with the help of the SHAR school-studio, that is, it can also be considered educational.
There are two of us in the main competition for Annecy, short films. Darina Shmidt from the St. Petersburg studio "Melnitsa" shows her debut painting "Little Vasilisa", a charming fairy tale drawn in the spirit of patchwork (in Russia last year she won at all possible festivals). Ivan Maksimov presents “Additional Features of Piglet” - a monstrous paraphrase of the plots of “Winnie the Pooh”.
In general, the short film competition looks very solid. There will be a new film by Canadian Cordell Barker (a director twice nominated for an Oscar, in particular with the film “The Cat Is Back”). Barker's Runaway Train, which will be screened in competition, just returned from Cannes with the Critics' Week minor prize. Other celebrities will include Nick Park with a new series about Wallis and Gromit, Georges Schwitzgebel with the film “Retouching”, Priit Pärn with the film “Life without Gabriella Ferri”, which the audience of the Big Cartoon Festival in Moscow has already seen in the fall. Two Pärnov students also entered the competition: Kaspar Jancis from Estonia (“Crocodile”) and Vladimir Leshchev from Latvia (“Wings and Oars”).
This year, the selection committee for short films included former pilot Alexey Alekseev, now living in Hungary. Annecy's selectors are famous for their strictness, and this can be seen even in the celebrities they leave out. For example, a new film by Canadian Chris Landreth, “Spine,” was included in the out-of-competition program, and this director, by the way, won an Oscar for the film “Ryan” (a fantasy about another famous director, Ryan Larkin). And a fresh picture by Gil Alkabetz, whose film “Dying of Love” collected all possible prizes several years ago. An Israeli now living in Germany made a film with the mocking title “Da Vinci Timecode,” but was not included in the competition. Among our conditionally, the out-of-competition program also includes the silhouette “Royal Nightmare” by Alexei Budovsky, who lives in the USA, but regularly screens films at domestic festivals.
Let's move on to the full meter. Here, of course, our paintings are not there - in “big” production, which requires a lot of money and a well-established “machine”, we are completely uncompetitive. But out of the nine films selected for the competition, Russian viewers have already seen two - these are the three-dimensional “Monsters vs. Aliens” and an even more three-dimensional one (that is, not only drawn on a computer in 3D technology, but also filmed in such a way that for the full effect of its three-dimensionality you need to watch it with glasses) also the American “Coraline”. The most anticipated film in the Annecy competition is the new film by Australian Adam Eliot, who won an Oscar five years ago for the short film Harvey Crumpet. Now he has shot the full length “Mary and Max” based on his own script. Everything about it is again very unusual: it is about a pen pal friendship between an autistic 40-year-old fat American Max Horowitz and an eight-year-old Australian girl.
Again, there are no our compatriots in advertising and videos (except for the girls who went to study in Germany - Veronika Samartseva and Anna Samoilovich shot the glorious music video “Hello, Antenna”). But in the “TV Series” nomination, oddly enough, there is a participant from Russia: this is Vlad Barbe, who started at the M.I.R. studio. shoot a three-dimensional series "KOAPP". One part of it will be shown at the competition - “The Lake Is Missing.”
And one more very important Russian participation. As many as three festival events are dedicated to the recently discovered pioneer of Russian animation, Alexander Shiryaev. That is, Shiryaev himself (dancer and choreographer of the Mariinsky Theater) is a fairly well-known figure in the history of ballet, but now it turned out that he also shot amazing dance puppet cartoons, and already in 1906, that is, significantly earlier than not only Vladislav Starevich, who, It was believed that he made the world's first puppet film, but also Emil Kohl, who is generally considered to be the world's first animator. Firstly, an exhibition dedicated to Shiryaev will be open in the library of the festival center all days, and secondly, a documentary film by film critic Evgeny Bocharov “Belated Premiere” will be shown, which Russian viewers have already seen at festivals and on the Culture channel. And in addition, for the first time in Annecy, an almost hour-long unique selection of surviving cartoons by Shiryaev will be shown. By the way, Bocharov received help restoring old films, oddly enough, not in Russia, but in England, at the Aardman studio, whose management was very interested in this project.
Now briefly about other things. In Annecy, it is customary for each festival to choose a country whose animation will be given special attention. Last year the focus was on India, this year on Germany. In addition, a whole block of programs dedicated to dance in animation has been prepared, and a block of programs where the Moon becomes the hero (in connection with the 40th anniversary of the landing on the Earth’s satellite). Another anniversary: the American radical public organization ACT UP, which defends the rights of AIDS patients, presents at this festival the program “20 years of protection” (by the way, among the earliest films in this selection are two two-minute films by Ukrainian director Mikhail Titov from 1992). It remains to be added that all week, until the closing ceremony and the presentation of prizes, which will take place on June 13, famous festival cartoons of past years will be shown in the clearing in front of the festival center on a giant open-air screen.