With the frigid temperatures of late, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the organisers of the Anima film festival in Brussels for choosing Spain as one of its guest countries. Although at this point, it’s fairly cold there, too, at least I can think back to last summer’s holiday as I enjoy a retrospective of Segundo Chomón or shake hands with director Gorka Vazquez, here to introduce his new movie Olentzero, which finds a boy apprentice to the Basque version of Santa Claus accidently releasing a jailed mischievous Elf.
This is the annual festival of animation, and Olentzero is a perfect entry: excellent technique, an appeal that spans generations and the use of local folk tales to tell a universal story. Spain’s animators have had had a marvellous year, so, while Anima will celebrate the country’s past, groundbreaking animators (such as Chomón, who mastered many forms of animation in the early 20th century and was particularly fond of bringing inanimate objects to life), it will also welcome contemporary work.
Along with Vazquez, you can get a glimpse of Ángel de la Cruz when he comes to talk about his film Arrugas (Wrinkles), the story of an old man in the early stage of Alzheimer’s, who plots with friends from his rest home a way to avoid being sent “upstairs” – home of the hopeless cases.
Arrugas is one of many submissions this year with “a preoccupation with social topics", says festival co-director Doris Cleven. “We have several short films with these themes – one about an ambulance driver on the night shift taking care of the socially disenfranchised, another about alcoholism, some about war. The Czech feature Aloïs Nebel is about a railway man who is haunted by his past at the border of Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War.”
Animated films, partially spurred by the international success of 2008’s remarkable Israeli documentary Waltz With Bashir, which used animation to recount the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, are leaning more towards subjects that have normally been reserved for live-action films. “There is a link now between animation and documentary,” says Cleven. “It’s interesting because the technique of animation, of creating a world of fantasy, allows a distance between the subject matter and the visuals. In turn, these kind of visuals create a dissonance between the subject and the viewer. You do not find this in a normal documentary. It’s a fascinating conflict.”
It’s a recent trend, but Anima has been around long enough to see many of those.
Anima was launched in 1981 by Brussels art history graduate Philippe Moins. “The only thing people knew about animation was Disney and the cartoons they saw on TV,” says Cleven. “He wanted to show that there was more than that – that there was a diversity of animation, and that it wasn’t all about the commercial market but that there was also a relationship between the arts and animation.”
In the early years, most of the films came from Eastern Europe, pioneers of stop-motion and puppet animation. In the 1990s came “the digital revolution”, says Cleven. “And that was very lucky for us.” Aside from big productions coming out of US studios like Pixar, the EU became more interested in supporting animated film projects, and the success of claymation further attracted more and more audiences to the festival.
Don’t miss the opportunity to see something from Spain; short programmes provide an excellent overview. The country’s claymation master, Samuel Orti Marti, will introduce his short films, and shorts from a variety of filmmakers are collected in other screenings.
Anima features many screenings of international shorts, plus Belgian-only programmes. The definition of “Belgium” is broad: Some filmmakers are Belgian, some are based here and some studied animation here. Don’t miss This is Belgium 1, the 20 that were selected for the official competition. That’s a record number; the more than 100 entries were so good, the jury couldn’t whittle it down any further.
Also recommended is the mid-length Sky Song by Estonian director Mat Kütt, who certainly hasn’t let down his Eastern European forefathers with this award-winning tale about a dedicated postman striving to deliver his packages to the moon. Kütt mixes stop-motion with other forms of animation and draws on historical icons such as Freud and Hitchcock.
Lest I forget, Switzerland is the other country focus this year at Anima, and you can’t go wrong with the short films of Isabelle Favez, who has honed the animated tragi-comedy to a fine art with her simple, round drawings.
And, finally, it wouldn’t be an animation festival without the Japanese. But even there you can aim for something different, with a new generation of filmmakers who, again, are taking a closer look at social issues. Keita Kurosaka’s Midori-Ko finds a young woman trying to save a half vegetable-half animal from both scientists and hungry neighbours during a food shortage in a not-so-distant-future Japan, while Jib (The House), made by a collective of Korean animators, finds another young woman trying to save her housing project – not for her or her neighbours but for the ghosts who live within it.
Of the 90 or so screenings of the 150 features and shorts at this year’s Anima festival, only about one-third are suitable for kids under 12. The festival’s programme guide helpfully lists age guidelines for each film, and it’s wise to heed them. Just because a movie is animated doesn’t mean that it doesn’t contain very adult themes, rough language or violence. Also, watch out for films that screen in their original language and are subtitled, not dubbed.
Flanders Today is a 
14°C / 28°C
