Anima 2010

Feeling a little off-colour this winter? A bit stressed out with listening to what is going wrong with the world? Anima is offering some light relief for the head and desire for the heart with a little cure of animation.There’s nothing like it for putting the neurons back in phase with the zygomatics and vice versa.

Mary and Max, the feature by Australian filmmaker Adam Eliot will be opening the Festival. This unusual, hilarious and very tender film featuring the voices of Eric Bana, Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman tied for the Grand Prix with Henry Selick’s Coraline at the last Annecy Festival.

Anima is first and foremost an international competition for animated features made during the previous 18 months. Ten features, 5 for children and 5 for adults, have been selected and will be chosen by the public.

There are two competitions for short films, one national the other international, along with the rest of the selection of sneak preview shorts offering 128 short films in all to appreciate in 9 international and 3 Belgian programmes, and not forgetting the Animated Night too.

International music videos and commercials will also be in competition. Twenty five thousand Euros in cash or material prizes are to be shared out between the different prize winners who will also receive prizes from Festival partners.

Screenings concentrating on a particular subject will give everyone the chance to discover or rediscover both dark and comic sides of animation, with programmes like Humour and Fresh Bones (guaranteed to cause a shiver), Acides Animés showing off the young generation with films from the innovating Autour de minuit production company, and all the films of Adam Elliot (Mary and Max). Another programme spotlights the work of French director Florence Miailhe, there’s a focus on Greek animation from the 40s to the present, and the Canadian documentary A Thorn in the Mind, where masters of animation like Pjotr Sapejin, Georges Schwizgebel or Raoul Servais talk about their art. Mr Servais will also be in attendance this year for the DVD release of his feature Taxandria, co-produced by Cinéart and Folioscope.

The afternoons are set aside for the kids at Anima with programmes of new shorts and features including Kurt Turns Evil, The Bear and the Magician and Panda Go Panda. There will be workshops too, in collaboration with the ABC association, and the Animatins will give a wide audience the opportunity to enjoy the Festival.

There’s also a very Animated Night at Anima (from 10 pm to 4 in the morning), a special VJ party with the Meaksuma collective, the Open Screenings, for all out of competition Belgian filmmakers, conferences with international guests… In short, enough to give the eyes a real treat from ten in the morning till midnight, every single day!

The Festival poster was entrusted to designer and scenographer François Schuiten. The Anima 2010 Grand prix trophy is the work of illustrator and animator Eric Blésin.