Animated Trips Part II: Personal Souvenirs

The following article attempts to recreate my personal animated film festivals itinerary of 2016 when I had the great pleasure to visit the following events: Animafest Zagreb 06.-11.06), Fest Anča (29.06.-03.07, Žilina, Slovakia), Animator (Poznań, Poland, 08.-14.07), Supertoon (Šibenik, Croatia, 24.-29.07.), Anibar (link: , Peja, Kosovo, 15.-21.08.), StopTrik IFF (Maribor, Slovenia, 27.-30.10., Łódź, Poland, 11.-12.11), Etiuda&Anima IFF (Kraków, Poland, 22.-27.11.), PAF (Olomouc, Czech Republic, 01.-04.12) and Animateka ( Ljubljana, Slovenia, 05.-11.12.).

Reviewing a festival seems like making personal judgments about the sensitivities of programmers, selectors, and jurors, a highly subjective occupation. In the first part of this article, I referred to the notable choices of the international jurors gathered at the mentioned festivals. Out of 18 awarded titles, Igor Kovalyov's Before Love, Marta Pajek's Impossible Figures and Other Stories: Part II, and Špela Čadež's Nighthawk have been awarded most frequently.

 2016 can be considered a truly good year for artistic animation, rich in challenging film works as well as courageous and wise signs of appreciation. However, the very nature of the festival rivalry leaves out a lot of impressive films.

Animafest Zagreb winners 2016 (c) Animafest Zagreb

For this reason I will focus now on subjectively chosen works overlooked by the experts. And since one of the reasons behind the festival is to encourage the viewers to think critically, I will also share certain hesitations and call for adopting particular attitude in film culture activism, the ideas that derive directly from my personal festival experience of 2016.

PERSONAL SOUVENIRS

At StopTrik, I have granted myself a privilege of naming my individual Special Mention. This year I have felt huge attraction to Brazilian film Tango made by Pedro Giongo and Francisco Gusso. What I appreciate about Tango above all is its narrative sophistication.

Thorough reflection on destructive forces equally overtaking primal rituals and advanced mass culture is apparent and powerful. The chosen one indulges in gluttony only to eventually die from starvation, in the same manner as the whole community exploits resources and abuses the others only to become sick, frightened and defenseless.

Tango

Three wise monkeys, whose task is to initiate the ritual again and again, know how pathological the moments of common happiness are, and how disgusting the moments of common misery become. The authors play with the viewer's willingness to interpret the film as an adaptation of some well-known myth, but here all the precisely crafted cut-out silhouettes and settings serve the purpose of intellectual deception.

We are familiar with all the elements, we realize where the story starts, where it finishes, why it has to return to its origins and unveils again, but this time it sews together attributes of modernity with images of phantasmatic tribal never-land, cut-outs painted in matt colours with disturbing ornaments, and consequently a repulsion is a mirroring reflection of a pity. And there is no way out.

Actually I have seen Tango for the first time on Animafest however from the festival in Zagreb I would prefer to point out Filipe Abranche's It Would Piss Me Off to Die So Yooooung...

Recent anniversary of the WWI outbreak has resulted in an eruption of the films on the subject, mostly following the same narrative and stylistics that recall 1957 Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece Paths of Glory, usually in an inefficient way, but It Would Piss Me Off... stands out in this category.

It Would Piss Me Off to Die So Yooooung...

Abranche's dim images constantly transform, defragmentation is overwhelming and dominates the narrative. It is again a story about the trenches, gas attacks and trauma of internecine combat. But all the elements serve the purpose of delineating fear. This major subject is manifested through decomposition of the images and wheezing sound effects.

Animal brutality is a twin of a fear and its truly mesmerizing depiction can be found in Shen Jie's Monkey (one of the highlights of Fest Anča).

Vibrating and pulsating 2D images refer to the tradition of animation of wash and ink painting. Repetitive violent acts are conducted by humanoid monkey or monkey-like human armed with a bat

Monkey

 Looped aggression in one - and everlasting - moment destroys the sacrum of beauty, tradition, and faith. All the visual elements are subjugated to two processes that are stylistically rich and highly symbolic on the level of interpretation, i.e. shattering and overturning. Apparently, Far East artistic sensitivity speaks to me since another meaningful experience comes from Yi Zhao (Chinese animator based in the Netherlands), the author of Löss (seen at Animator),  and Qing Sheng Ang from Singapore, a director of Drop Nowhere (seen at Etiuda&Anima).

Yi Zhao combines dark cut-outs with delicate sketches of set design to create a reality that seems to be suspended in time, but with each slowly changing image, the viewer realizes that the cruel story of slavery, sexual abuse, and murder strongly relates to contemporary times.  The silhouettes are rough, ponderous, and dull, resembling wooden or mud figurines (the latter indeed play an important part in the relation between a man and a woman).

Loss

 The plateau landscape leaves no hope; the horizon is dark and completely beyond the enslaved woman's reach. Similarly to Chinese melodrama, here the emotions are raised to the highest level, even exaggerated, but Yi Zhao knows how to maintain the balance. A spectator's gaze is led by smooth editing, soft backgrounds, and a tender soundtrack.

 Aesthetically, Drop Nowhere is the complete opposite of Löss. 3D imaginary presents contemporary Singapore in the brightest daylight, filled with urban buzz. An infant looks for his favorite toy that fell out of the window of the tall building. Unaware of the danger, he goes down to the following balconies, rails, and ledges, and only coincidental blasts save him from a fatal fall.

Drop Nowhere

 Down the way, he encounters inhabitants of the building, the migrants who constitute an urban tissue, being at the same time invisible and unimportant to him. The baby's pursuit of the slipping toy is dynamic and sensual, puts the viewer on alert, and raises their heartbeat. Social inclinations of the film remain clear, yet the major question focuses on the child's survival.

 I hope to stick to the principle of one film out of one festival. But with Anibar, I have quite a headache, for the competition programme in Peja was really strong. Should I outline Uri and Michelle Kranot's How Long, Not Long  or Stephanie Lansaque and Francois Leroy's Cold Coffee profound warnings against embracing collective and individual obsessions? Instead, I will point your attention to Aurore Peuffier's Lead in the Head, a professional début of a graduate of ENSAD.

Lead in the Head

Wolf shot in the head wakes up in the middle of a small town, causing panic and fright among the citizens, but it only looks for the mercy of a final killing. Pain, madness and haunt are transmitted through painting based on trembling and vibrant colour stains. The animal's gasping is a dominant sound effect; it can't be stifled by the small town's rumours. Impression is powerful and immediate, sorrow is overwhelming, dancing colours are immersive.

Two subtle films from Serbia and Slovenia will close this personal verdict, Jelena Milunović's Distances Are Overcome (seen at Supertoon) and Leon Vidmar's Farewell (seen at Animateka). Milunović is a young and modest author who participated in a wider project, "Radiovision" that aims to revive significant broadcasts of Radio Belgrade through the animated medium. The recording used in Distances... is the last radio speech of Isidora Sekulić, a famous Serbian writer preoccupied with the humanitarian responsibilities of the young Yugoslav generation.

Distances are overcome

Sekulić does not preach but indicates awaiting challenges appropriately. Milunović does not illustrate a writer's memento but carefully follows the dramaturgy of the talk, transposing its structure into a dispersed pattern of a surreal landscape.

 Dramaturgical intuition is also a strong point of Vidmar's film. Lyrical approach is characteristic of Slovenian puppet film, but Farewell does not copy motifs and threads mastered in the recent past by Špela Čadež.

Farewell

 The detailed puppetry appears impressive; it is truly hard to stop focusing on the depth and sadness of the characters' eyes or the specificity of the rural pond set design. Transitions between time layers in storytelling are unpretentious, though the general theme of recalling memories of the grandfather and the use of the symbolism of water seemed risky at least. Furthermore, the transitions clearly derive from the settings, instigated by the contemplation of the bathtub drain or water drops.

 Eventually, the festival tour of 2016 allowed me to dig into the depths of animated film history. On each event, another forgotten treasure has been displayed, but certainly the screening of Marcell Jankovic's Fehérlófia at PAF examined the limits of my perception.

Here I break my principle since Jankovic's film is a feature-length but PAF encourages such attitude. Psychedelic visuals of Fehérlófia are based on spinning or kaleidoscopic compositions of transforming, multiplying, or defragmenting lines, shapes, and characters. A story originating from Hunnic and Avaric legends supposedly follows the "rule of three" fairytale, but the visual experience of whirl, circulation, and immersion is much more important than the linear development of voice-over storytelling. The screen is engaging, yet if you loose your focus there's no way to keep up the pace of floating images that mock one's cognitive habits.

ASKING FOR DIRECTIONS

Obviously, it is impossible to single out all the inspirations experienced during such an intense festival trip. Animafest and Animator organized conferences attended by aspiring film scholars as well as renowned academics and filmmakers.

PAF invited over 30 international experts to share their views deriving from artistic practice, film studies, anthropology, and history of culture on the general festival theme inspired by John Berger's writings: why look at the animals? Fest Anča, Etiuda&Anima and Animateka build their professional programmes on a series of master classes.

As I believe, meetings with Brothers Quay, Steven Woloshen, Signe Baumane, Anita Killi, Georges Schwizgebel, Chris Landreth or Paul Bush demand autonomous coverage.

Chris Landreth @ Animateka 2016 (photo: Katja Golat / Andrej Firm)

Not to praise StopTrik too much, but I hope that the attendees found the in-depth meeting with Miloš Tomić and the discussion on the specificity of stop motion with invited filmmakers inspiring. Supertoon dedicated a lot of time and passion to bringing the audience close to the living legend of Borivoj Dovniković-Bordo

StopTrik 2016 (photo credits: Michal Cernasky)

And every day at Anibar, you learn a tremendous amount about film cultural activism, see the actual change in spectators' behavior, and observe the construction of the public sphere as a work-in-progress. From the perspective of a person involved in Film Studies and a festival organizer, the most significant standpoint that crystallized in 2016 is a call for proper archiving, preparation of the festival materials based on fact-checking, construction of the arguments in discussion (either informative or academic) detached from speculation but rooted in verifiable knowledge.

On the Scanner conference at Animafest Zagreb, a most prominent figure of Animation Studies, Giannalberto Bendazzi, whose contribution to the field can't be overestimated, posed an argument that Fred Wolf's 1968 Oscar-winning The Box (1967) is a plagiarism of Bordo's Curiosity, which was awarded at the 1967 Krakow Film Festival) while presenting no strong evidence that would sustain it. Definitive accusations of this kind petrify possible disputes of historical influences.

 In consequence of such deliberations, confused film scholars and critics may easily get lost in the labyrinths of contradictory writings, empty festival archives, and inaccessible press clipping collections. No doubt that the festival is a temporary celebration of contemporaneity, yet it also shapes the local community, structures the process of reception of works of art, and eventually serves as a source of knowledge.

The last function shall not be neglected, by either organizers or visitors. Otherwise, no matter how successful, professional, and impressive the event we will create or attend, something of value will be missed.

Olga Bobrowska