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Spanish director Fernando Cortizo is doing something rare: making his animated feature easy to see.

The <Annecy International Animated Film Festival, which concluded on June 15th, awarded its Cristal prize for feature to the Brazilian film, Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury. The festival’s Cristal for short film went to the NFB short Subconscious Password, a CG/pixilation effort by Oscar-winner Chris Landreth (Ryan).

The complete list of winners is below:

The Cristal for best feature
Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury
Directed by Luiz Bolognesi (Brazil)

The Cristal for best short
Subconscious Password
Directed by Chris Landreth (Canada)

The Cristal for best TV production
Room on the Broom
Directed by Jan Lachauer and Max Lang (Great Britain)

The Cristal for best commissioned film
Dumb Ways to Die
Directed by Julian Frost (Australia)

Feature Films: Special Distinction
My Mommy Is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill
Directed by Marc Boréal and Thibaut Chatel (France/Luxembourg)

Feature Films: Audience Award
O Apóstolo
Directed by Fernando Cortizo Rodriguez (Spain)

Short Films: Special Jury Award
The Wound
Directed by Anna Budanova (Russia)

Short Films: Distinction for a first film
Trespass
Directed by Paul Wenninger (Austria)

Short Films: Jean-Luc Xiberras Award for a first film
Norman
Directed by Robbe Vervaeke (Belgium)

Short Films: Special Distinction
The Triangle Affair
Directed by Andres Tenusaar (Estonia)

Short Films: Sacem Award for original music
Lonely Bones
Directed by Rosto (The Netherlands)

Short Films: Junior Jury Award
Feral
Directed by Daniel Sousa (USA)

Short Films: Audience Award
Lettres de femmes
Directed by Augusto Zanovello (France)

TV: Special Award for a TV series
Tom & The Queen Bee
Directed by Andreas Hykade (Germany)

TV: Award for best TV special
Poppety in the Fall
Directed by Pierre-Luc Granjon and Antoine Lanciaux (France)

Commissioned films: Special Jury Award
Benjamin Scheuer: “The Lion”
Directed by Peter Baynton (Great Britain)

Graduation Films: Award for best graduation film
Ab ovo
Directed by Anita Kwiatkowska-Naqvi (Poland)

Graduation Films: Special Jury Award
I Am Tom Moody
Directed by Ainslie Henderson (Great Britain)

Graduation Films: Special Distinction
Pandas
Directed by Matus Vizar (Slovakia)

Graduation Films: Junior Jury Award
Rabbit and Deer
Directed by Peter Vacz (Hungary)

Unicef Award
Because I’m a Girl
Directed by Raj Yagnik, Mary Matheson, and Hamilton Shona (Great Britain)

Fipresci Award
Gloria Victoria
Directed by Theodore Ushev (Canada)

Fipresci Special Distinction
Feral
Directed by Daniel Sousa (USA)

“CANAL+ creative aid” Award for a short film
Autour du lac
Directed by Carl Roosens and Noémie Marsily (Belgium)

Festivals Connexion Award – Région Rhône-Alpes with Lumières Numériques
Feral
Directed by Daniel Sousa (USA)

The Funniest Film according to the Annecy Public
KJFG No 5
Directed by Alexey Alekseev (Hungary)

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)

Annecy, the longest-running and largest animation fesival, has announced the feature film selections for their upcoming festival in June. Nine films were chosen to compete for the Cristal award for feature film, which will be decided by a jury consisting of producer Didier Brunner (Les Armateurs), Cartoon Network exec Brian Miller and director Robert Morgan (The Cat with Hands, The Man in the Lower-Left Hand Corner of the Photograph). An additional fourteen features will screen out of competition.

Marcel Jean, the festival’s artistic director, said of this year’s feature selections:

“Many films have been created in a totally independent way, using traditional means, which illustrates the change in production habits that is opening the way for smaller companies and happening at the same moment as the production of digital 3D features is becoming more accessible. Japanese production has also particularly stood out through the number and quality of science fiction, horror or genre films.”

Feature Films—In Competition

• Arjun, The Warrior Prince
  Directed by Arnab Chaudhuri (India)

Feature Films—Out of Competition

• After School Midnighters
  Directed by Hitoshi Takekiyo (Japan)