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Japan vs UK: Anima festival of animation returns to Brussels

14:35 01/02/2016
The annual Anima film festival is spotlighting two countries with very different animation traditions this year at Flagey

Anima, one of Europe’s most respected animation film festivals, will again be showing animation films from around the world in Brussels this month. Festival organisers hope to welcome at least as many people as they did last year, when Anima drew 40,000 visitors.

This edition (the 35th, but who’s counting?) focuses on two countries with rich but very different animation traditions – Japan and the UK. Japan is typically seen as the mother of all animated cinema, and Studio Ghibli, home of the famous animator Hayao Miyazaki, is a brand as internationally respected as Disney and Pixar.

But the Anima festival organisers want to show there’s more to Japanese animation than Studio Ghibli. Through screenings and an exhibition with original drawings and sets from classic titles like Ghost in the Shell and Metropolis, the festival zooms in on the visions of the future of Japanese animation films.

Of course, the festival also presents new work, most remarkably The Case of Hana & Alice – the first venture of Shunji Iwai, one of Japan’s greatest live action directors, into the world of animation. The Japan section of the festival also includes a series of shorts made by the animation department of the Tokyo University of Arts.

Oscar nominee

The UK’s most famous animation studio, meanwhile, is Aardman, which has produced some of the world’s best stop-motion clay animation (think Wallace & Gromit or Shaun the Sheep). One of its co-founders, Peter Lord, will visit the festival with a couple of surprises.

You’ll be able to see more British gems in The British Touch, a compilation of work produced by the new wave of animation filmmakers that surfaced during the 1980s and ’90s, thanks to money from Channel Four.

The Anima competition for feature films will include another famous live-action filmmaker who made the transition to animation – Charlie Kaufman of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind fame. His stop-motion film Anomalisa is currently nominated for an Academy Award.

Aside from Kaufman, the competition also unites household names like the Japanese Mamoru Hosod, and up-and-coming filmmakers like the Spanish duo Alberto Vazquez and Pedro Rivero.

The festival’s dedicated children’s section is split into two age categories: toddlers and youngsters. The films for the first group are mostly in French, while those aimed at the latter are typically in Dutch, sometimes with English subtitles.

Another festival section is dedicated to shorts. Anima received more than 1,200 submissions, with some 100 selected to be shown. Here, too, you’ll find a mix of new names and veterans of the trade like Australian director Adam Elliot and US animator Don Herzfeld.

Crusoe and Tuesday

Shorts are grouped into programmes, with some focusing on film schools. Of course, local institutions (there are three animation programmes in Brussels, one in Flanders and one in Wallonia) are also highlighted here.

Flemish feature animation films are a rare thing, so it was a wise move to put Cafard (pictured), an underrated gem released last September, on the bill. This beautifully drawn movie by Jan Bultheel tells the story of a world wrestling champion from Ostend and his experiences during the First World War.

And did you know that Brussels is home to one of the most famous 3D animation studios in the world? nWave is the company behind Fly Me to the Moon and Sammy’s Adventures. Its latest international production, Robinson Crusoe, opens the festival. This movie retells the traditional Crusoe story through the eyes of Tuesday, a parrot on the island where the eponymous character washed ashore.

5-14 February at Flagey, Brussels
www.animafestival.be

Written by Christophe Verbiest

Comments

Ronn91 May 18, 2017 08:25