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Maggie Steele, the storybook heroine who vaults over the moon, has been attracting thousands of visitors from around the world. So many visitors, in fact, that she’s using a time zone map to keep track of them all.* People are … Continue reading →

I returned a few days ago from the Czech Republic where I judged the feature film categories at Anifilm, a fun festival filled with great people and positive energy that is situated in the quaint lakeside resort town of Trebon. The three-person feature film jury consisted of Portuguese filmmaker Regina Pessoa (Tragic Story with Happy Ending, Kali the Little Vampire), Slovenian festival director Igor Prassel (Animateka International Animated Film Festival) and myself. (That’s us in the photo above.)

The Anifilm organizers smartly divided features into two categories: adult and children’s films. We watched five films in each category. In the Adult category, we awarded the top prize to Chris Sullivan’s sweeping and uncompromising Southern Gothic tale Consuming Spirits, and also gave special mention to Don Hertzfeldt’s feature It’s Such a Beautiful Day. These two films alone don’t make a trend, but add Paul and Sandra Fierlinger’s My Dog Tulip and Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues to the list, and you could argue that American indie feature animation is experiencing a renaissance right now. All of these films utilize animation effectively to express deeply personal visions.

The other three features in the Adult category—O Apóstolo from Spain, A Liar’s Autobiography from the United Kingdom and Fat Bald Short Man from Colombia—each had positive qualities and exhibited the kind of maturity and narrative ambition that is often lacking in mainstream feature animation fare.

The children’s category was less impressive. The five features were European co-productions that relied on cliches borrowed from popular American films. Three of the films featured hot air balloons (UP, of course), and a number of them used the ‘dead parents’ trope that is an all-too-common fallback for lazy animation scriptwriters. We awarded the children’s prize to The Day of Crows (Le jour des corneilles) which was unquestionably the most interesting film of the bunch. The hand-drawn animated film featured appealing (if inconsistent) animation and character designs, along with gorgeous backgrounds. It reached for Miyazaki-style mysticism before attempting to hamhandedly explain everything in the last act. Imperfect, but worth a look.

Animation director Bill Plympton wrote about his recent experience judging the feature animation categories at the Stuttgart Animation Festival in Germany. He watched eight features at that festival, and it’s interesting to note that not a single one of those films was in competition at Anifilm. It’s a reminder that feature animation is a flourishing art form today. The handful of mega-budget corporate-studio films that dominate American multiplexes barely scratch the surface of what’s available in the marketplace.

The good news is that institutional support is growing for more diverse types of feature animation. Most major animation festivals now have feature film categories, and of course, there’s the Oscars, which hands out an Academy Award specifically for animated features. The American distributor GKIDS has made a commitment to distributing foreign animated features, and this site you’re reading attempts to cover independent and foreign animated features as few other major animation media outlets have in the past.

More and more companies are turning their attention to the rich world of feature animation, but there is still plenty of room for others to join. For example, when will Criterion begin releasing art house animated features? When will distributors bring foreign animated features into multiplexes across the country? Exciting times are ahead in the feature animation field.

(Jury photo by Jan Hromádko)

The 4th edition of Anifilm International Festival of Animated Films will take place in Třeboň, Czech Republic from May 3 to 8. The festival recently announced its competition line-up which includes 10 animated features and 50 short films. Anifilm will also present tributes to the legendary animation studios Zagreb Film and United Productions of America (UPA) with multiple programs dedicated to the films of those studios. Special guests include legendary filmmakers Borivoj Dovnikovic of Zagreb Film and Gene Deitch of UPA.

I’m excited to be heading to the festival to moderate a panel about UPA that will include Gene Deitch and filmmaker Emily Hubley (John and Faith Hubley’s daughter). I will also be serving on the feature film jury with filmmaker Regina Pessoa (Kali the Little Vampire, Tragic Story with Happy Ending) and Igor Prassel, programming director of the Slovenian festival Animateka International Animated Film Festival.

(Anifilm photo by Danica Kovacevic)

Trailer for Alois Nebel, a new Czech animated feature directed by Tomáš Luňák. It debuts this month at the Venice Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival, and opens soon afterward in the Czech Republic. The story looks engaging which is good because the graphic style that stems from the Waking Life school of floaty rotoscope doesn’t excite me at all. They combined the roto with a black-and-white palette, which has been a trendy look in recent indie animated features like Renaissance, Persepolis, Fear(s) of the Dark, and the semi-b&w Mary and Max. No word on international release dates, but stay tuned to the official website AloisNebel.cz.

Film synopsis if you want to know more:

The end of the eighties in the twentieth century. Alois Nebel works as a dispatcher at the small railway station on the Czech-Polish border. He’s a loner, who prefers old timetables to people, and he finds the loneliness of the station tranquil – except when the fog rolls in. Then he hallucinates, sees trains from the last hundred years pass through the station. They bring ghosts and shadows from the dark past of Central Europe.

The feature film Alois Nebel is an adaptation of the graphic novel by Jaroslav Rudiš and Jaromír 99 combining animation and live-action. The authors have chosen rotoscoping as the visual approach for the film in order to remain true to the style of the original comic book.

(Thanks to Tom for pointing out the story on Twitch)

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Czech Republic, Rotoscope, Tomáš Luňák

Rancho Girl by Jorge Ruiz (USA/Venezuela)

Various Fluid Experiments by Vladimir Jankijevic (Switzerland)

Myslivci by Jan Saska (Czech Republic)

SVA Dusty Animation Night Intro by Kaukab Basheer (USA/India)

“Bully” Album Teaser by A3+ (France)

Browse through the Animated Fragments on Cartoon Brew or subscribe to our channel on Vimeo to see most of them.

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: A3+, Czech Republic, France, India, Jan Saska, Jorge Ruiz, Kaukab Basheer, Switzerland, Venezuela, Vladimir Jankijevic

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In Economics of Good and Evil, Tomas Sedlacek asks: does it pay to be good? In order to answer this question, he looks at the way societies have reconciled their moral values with economic forces. He explores economic ideas in world literature, from concepts of productivity and employment in Gilgamesh to consumerism in Fight Club. In the videos below Sedlacek talks about why he wrote the book, before going on to explain ‘the story of Joseph and bastard-Keynesianism’.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tomas Sedlacek works for the National Economic Council in the Czech Republic and is a former economic advisor to President Václav Havel. The Yale Economic Review called him one of the ‘5 Hot Minds in Economics’. He will be talking about his book at the RSA in London on Thursday 16 June.

View more about this book on the

Eve Donegan, Sales & Marketing Assistant

Vojtech Novotny is Professor of Ecology at the University of South Bohemia and the Head of the Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology at the Biology Center of the Czech Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic. Novotny is currently directing the New Guinea Binatang Research Center, in Papua New Guinea, where an international team of scientists is studying the relationships between plants and insects in tropical rainforests. In the original post below, translated by David Short, Novotny looks at how tradition can cause epidemics.  Be sure to check out the other posts in this series, which will continue all week, here.

Today Mr. P. of the Fore tribe is a university student, but his grandfather was a great warrior. His aggression had earned him numerous enemies among the neighboring tribes. They had failed to kill him in battle, so it was the turn of magic. But even this has its technical limitations, since the magician’s task calls for some material from the body of an intended victim – uneaten bits of food contaminated by saliva, a snippet of hair, a nail trimming, some feces or blood; in modern terminology a DNA sample.

Grandpa was well aware of the magicians’ interest and kept a close eye on all his bodily waste products. Of course, his wife was incautious, as all women are, and so the magicians were able to obtain some biological material at least from her. They wrapped it in a rolled-up leaf, which they then buried in a secret spot. As the leaf gradually degraded, so the woman began to ail, losing her muscular coordination until she lost all control over her movements and died. Thus, Grandpa lost his first wife, then his second, and finally the third as well. Only the fourth survived the snares of the magicians and lived to a ripe old age, caring for fifteen children, her own and those of her three less fortunate predecessors.

The machinations of the magicians survived into the next generation. Mr. P.’s father died in middle age and of no apparent cause, so it must have been through magic. Ten years later, in 2006, his uncle also died. As one of the guests, already suspect, arrived at the funeral, the coffin took to shaking and so the deceased provided evidence of the culprit’s guilt. The others were ready for such an outcome and using a home-made rifle put a bullet through the magician’s head without ado. His brother made to flee the feast, but the person sitting closest to him wasted no time and slashed his Achilles’ tendon with a machete while another of the guests shot him through the chest with an arrow.

In the 1950s, a time when Mr. P.’s grandmothers were being bewitched one after another, the land of the Fore was reached by doctors from the Australian colonial administration, who discovered that the tribe was dying out from a previously unknown neurodegenerative disease, known locally as kuru. Further research showed that this is an infectious disease caused by prions, defective proteins that gradually accumulate in the patient’s nervous system.

Prions used to be transmitted through cannibalism, especially through eating a dead person’s brain. Within the Fore tribe, this was reserved to the womenfolk, which is why the disease spread preeminently among them. The brain of a dead man would be eaten by his sister, maternal aunts and daughter-in-law, a woman’s by her daughter-in-law and her sisters-in-law. It was usually mixed with the leaves of ferns, which are to this day used as a vegetable, and steamed over a fire inside hollow bamboo canes.

Kuru remains an incurable, fatal illness, though its single known epidemic ended spontaneously once the Fore gave up their cannibalistic funeral rites. This came about under pressure from the Australian colonial administration, though the people themselves never believed in the link between cannibalism and the disease and continued to hold black magic uniquely responsible for kuru. A headcount of patients carried out in 2004 revealed that there were now a mere eleven with the disease, all of whom had been infected way back in childhood, some as long as fifty years previously or more. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the identification and description of the disease a monothematic issue of the Transactions of the Royal Society came out in 2007 under the optimistic theme The End of Kuru: 50 Years of Research into an Extraordinary Disease.

The rapid spread of prions among the Fore fifty years ago brought about a change in the entire tribe’s thinking, which centered on black magic. The only way they could account for the large numbers of people affected and their unhappy demise was a massive and merciless application of black magic. While perhaps only the last dozen brains on the planet are now infested with actual kuru prions, the stereotypes they gave rise to, which would see some magician responsible for each and every death, live on in the heads of successive generations of hosts with far greater resilience.

Seen from the perspective of modern medicine, of which there are barely any exponents at all among the Fore, this tribe has been through a major, almost fatal epidemic, from which it has now fully recovered. The Fore people themselves, however, see the event in different terms, as a crazy episode of mutual mass murder, the course and consequences of which are still being resolved. The seeking-out and punishment of those held responsible, and the never-ending chain of reciprocal acts of retaliation go on and on.

Eve Donegan, Sales & Marketing Assistant

In Notebooks from New Guinea, author Vojtech Novotny colorfully illuminates life in the rainforest. Novotny provides an engaging look into the natural history, people, and cultures of one of the last wild frontiers in the world, as he studies and researches the local biodiversity. The Q & A below kicks off our week-long series on Novotny and the adventures he has faced as a Czech scientist living and working in Papua New Guinea so be sure to check back throughout the week.

OUP: How focused is your research on New Guinea’s environment in comparison to your focus on the people of New Guinea?

Vojtech Novotny: Although a few of my colleagues prefer the solitary pursuit of biological knowledge in the seclusion of their study, a majority of contemporary research is rather a socially intense undertaking. Our research explores the extraordinary diversity of rainforest trees in New Guinea pollinated, attacked, and protected by an array of often intriguing insects, many of them still unknown to science. This research can also be seen as an interesting social experiment, where remote rainforest villages are unexpectedly visited by an improbable ensemble of Papua New Guineans and expatriates, speaking as many as ten different mother tongues and with education ranging from six years of primary school to a PhD degrees, all of them inexplicably interested in apparently worthless plants and insects in the villagers’ backyard. It is no coincidence that many researchers who originally focused only in New Guinea biodiversity, have gradually broadened their interest also to social and cultural themes. It is such an obvious thing to do here on this, biologically as well as culturally fascinating, island.

OUP: Has working in a remote lab with fewer amenities than other scientists have access to, affected your quality of work?

Novotny: Nowadays it is easier to obtain access to a high-tech laboratory than to an undisturbed ecosystem available for ecological studies and experiments. Our New Guinea laboratory is in the best possible position for our research. It is surrounded by the island’s vast rainforests, while the research gadgets of the latest fashion can be always accessed through overseas collaboration. A bigger problem is the lack of intellectually exciting milieu, since your colleague working on some unrelated, yet a stimulating problem is rarely able to pop into your lab since the nearest such colleague is hundreds of kilometers away. No Skype conversation can fully replace those informal discussions during tea breaks over coffee, or in the evenings over vast amounts of beer.

OUP: How has your Czech heritage influenced your research, your writing, and your overall experience in New Guinea?

Novotny: Coming from a small, strange tribe with a language and culture nothing like those of your neighbors is an advantage in New Guinea, as it helps to blend in the crowd of similarly afflicted citizens. Moving to live in Papua New Guinea is perhaps easier from a small country, such as the Czech Republic, where you can expect that the random impacts shaping your life trajectory will sooner or later propel you beyond your country’s borders anyway. Why then not to take life in your own hands, pack you bags and leave for New Guinea immediately? Leaving a big country is a bigger decision than leaving a small one. I am curious myself whether my thinking about New Guinea is influenced by the fact that it is being done in the Czech language, but this question is probably best left for the English speaking readers to answer.

OUP: As a speaker of the English language, why do you choose to use a translator for your written works?

Novotny: My English is good enough to report on bare facts of life, as I do in my research papers on rainforest ecology. Writing essays is different, as their form is as important as substance. Somewhat ironically, my translator David Short can reproduce my Czech writing style in English better than myself. Inexplicably, speaking perfect Czech is a rare skill among native English speakers. A lot of interesting writing in Czech, as well as in other small languages, thus never makes it to the English speaking audience without being seriously damaged in the process.

OUP: What role have the indigenous people of New Guinea had on your research?

Novotny: Our research is being done in a large part by Papua New Guineans. While some research teams gain competitive advantage in their field of research by owning for instance a particularly large DNA sequencing machine, or having a particularly bright theoretician in their midst, our secret weapon is a team of 18 indigenous research technicians, able to stage research expeditions in the most remote corners of Papua New Guinea’s rainforests. Our research is thus shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of our New Guinea staff. We have been promoting indigenous researcher teams for ecological studies in tropical forests for many years, but with a limited success. This is probably because while a brand new DNA sequencer can be easily bought off the shelf in your local supermarket, and a bright theoretician obtained from the nearest university, assembling a research team from rainforest dwellers is not an entirely straightforward exercise.

OUP: What other books should we read on this topic?

Novotny: Alfred Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago remains, almost 150 years since its publication, one of the best accounts on biological field work. Peter Matthiessen’s Under the Mountain Wall is an excellent record of traditional life in New Guinea, while Paige West’s Conservation Is Our Government Now and Bob Connolly’s Making ‘Black Harvest’ has updates on this lifestyle coping with modern influences. Saem Majnep’s and Ralph Bulmer’s Animals the Ancestors Hunted is a unique first-hand account of local animal lore written by a New Guinea villager. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel was partly inspired by New Guinea. And, as a final non-sequitur, James Watson’s The Double Helix is still perhaps the best description of how science is being done, whether in USA or New Guinea.

OUP: What do you read for fun?

Novotny: My eclectic tastes include travel writing by Bruce Chatwin and Ryszard Kapuscinski, fiction by Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco, Douglas Adams as well as by my compatriots Bohumil Hrabal and Franz Kafka, and, last but not least, Max Cannon’s Red Meat Cartoons. Most recently, I have enjoyed Michael Frayn’s novel Headlong.