Stepping into a vibrant world of creativity and imagination, this year’s Animafest Youth Competition selection shows an enthusiastic cohort of animators who take the audience on an emotional journey, from the warm nostalgia of childhood memories to darker and playful tones, cherishing youth through different aspects and emotions. Here we will explore the most interesting titles from the thoughtfully curated and thoroughly entertaining program aimed at young audiences over 15 years of age.

The selection opens with the French comedy-fantasy ‘Star Fish’, directed by Alissar Dewiche, Costa Micheletti, and Yohji Suzana. The film’s stylized figures – two young adolescents and a silly cat – immediately capture the warmth and ease that childhood is supposed to feel like. It opens on a vibrant French countryside, its rows of grass and reeds painted in multicolored brushstrokes, giving a very dreamlike setting of a timeless journey where these two teenagers’ youth can be played out carefree in these sunlit fields. It becomes quite easy to empathize with the emotions of the two friends as they converse about what the future may bring to their relationship and whether the change will be good or not. A rainy, black-and-white scene shows their fear of growing up, in a way similar to grieving over lost innocence. At the same time, there is a feeling of adventure, conveyed through an alternation of various surreal landscapes, that prompts them to sweep those negative thoughts away and focus on the present moment. By imagining and moving through made-up universes, they find a way to stay, even just for a brief moment, in the carefree spirit of childhood, with nothing to answer to but their own imagination.

Star Fish

Continuing on a personal note, ‘Look at Me’, a French short film directed by Fabrice Garcia-Carpintero, is a surreal 2D computer-animated short centered on Célian, a six-year-old with autism, inspired by the director’s own son. The film visually splits his world in two: a muted, rule-bound reality where he tries to follow his parents’ instructions, and a vivid inner life where he reimagines himself as a palaeontologist in a prehistoric time born from his fascination with science. When his father suffers a heart attack and collapses, Célian doesn’t call for help; instead, he sets off alone through the city, disrupting his ordered routine. Forced to make his own decisions, he’s confronted with the frenetic, at times ugly, sides of the real world: cars too loud, crowds too dense; none of it is something he feels ready for. After an unwanted advance from a homeless man at a metro stop, he retreats from that discomfort into his imagination, shape-shifting into a palaeontologist in the age of dinosaurs – the only way he can make sense of things before facing his family’s situation. In the end, he is simply a child who has always understood the world from the inside out, guided by the absurd logic of an autistic kid. 

Look at Me

From childhood to girlhood, ‘The Autoharp Crushing on Hot Guys’, a Czech documentary drawn on paper and directed by Antoine Zavalidová, is exactly the breath of fresh, colorful air the selection needed. Presenting a light and fun conversation between two friends, one of whom has Down syndrome, the film’s playful, sketchy illustrations treat both characters as complete equals, each with the same desires, humor, and emotional depth. The depiction of the “hot” guys is stylized and unpolished, made up of paper cut-outs that preserve the rawness of the drawn-on-paper aesthetic. But the most interesting part isn’t the images; it’s the dialogue. There is something intimate about hearing two friends reinvent and act out hypothetical scenarios of how a relationship could go, an openness to what they want that feels both funky and intriguing, and there’s a coolness in seeing love as something to play with and laugh about together. That same intimacy carries through the whole film, a coming-of-age short grounded in honesty and pure entertainment, capturing the specific, slightly chaotic energy of female friendship and comfortably recounting the very teenage business of crushing on hot guys. 

With ‘The Scarlet Tamagotchi’, a Chilean film by Francisco Visceral Rivera – recently awarded a Special Recognition at Animafest – the selection takes a sharp, delightful turn into a comedy-detective parody with no interest in taking itself seriously. The film opens with a crime: a scarlet Tamagotchi stolen from the classroom. Amid the chaos, two students, Iñaki and his turtle friend Cecilio, transform into 1940s private detectives to crack the case. The movie succeeds with its quick comic timing as it leads us through a mystery that takes place in a progressively more noir and minimal but expressive setting created with cell drawings and cut-outs. Through combining noir detective tropes with a hand-drawn collage style, ‘The Scarlet Tamagotchi’ manages to be charismatic and visually compelling, turning the classroom into an unhinged mini-version of society: lawless, funny, and fully committed to its own absurd logic. 

Collectively, these four shorts selected from the Animafest’s Youth Competition program show how vast the spectrum of emotions can become during childhood: from the melancholic feeling associated with growing up in ‘Star Fish’ to the imaginary world of one’s mind in ‘Look at Me’; from the intimate world of girlhood in ‘The Autoharp Crushing on Hot Guys’ to the wild and chaotic fun of classroom detectives in ‘The Scarlet Tamagotchi’. What is evident from this year’s Youth Competition is that animation has the capability to tell the complexities of childhood through warmth and weirdness, innocence and anxiety, in complete honesty.

• Our coverage of the Animafest Zagreb
• All our GoCritic! reviews

Contributed by: Fortunata (Tino) Manenti 

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