Annecy Festival 2024 went strong this year as well in terms of expanded programme (mainly in its animation feature selection), people attending (but not always glued to the screenings) and all kinds of animation events that accompany a festival of this size.

As always, there is a big discussion that accompanies big festival and they change throughout the year; but what won't change are the films and the indie animation creators themselves. They are still here, and our job is to showcase them -get them another life, away from the Bonlieu and Pathé packed animation screenings.

In this article we again present (as we did with the 2023 and the 2022 shorts), a selection of the best of the crop. Varied, multi-layered animation shorts that screened during the festival -and they need to be further highlighted.

The animation shorts were selected from the Short Films in Competition, Perspectives, Off-Limits and Young Audiences section of the Annecy Festival competition (with apologies to the student animation films and TV/Commissioned films that were not considered for this article). All of them tell their own animated story.

Olga Bobrowska (OB), Mikhail Gurevich (MG) and Vassilis Kroustallis (VK) contributed to this report.

The Best Animation Shorts of Annecy Festival 2024

(in alphabetical order)

[S], Mario Radev (United Kingdom, 2024)
Short Films In Competition

A proof that the report of traditional animation's death was an exaggeration. Stop-motion is used briefly at the beginning and the end, but it sets the tone that echoes pre-cinematic experiences and is later expanded with the means of drawn-on-paper animation. Notably, a man who activates an indefinite drawn loop does that with the power of his hands and legs’ muscles. The mesmerizing drawings reveal a sensitivity to surrealist characteristics. The object being drawn appears as a gigantic, melting, and constantly transforming chain that resembles both vintage machinery and a living creature. Trance-like and immersive visuals work in great synergy with the emotive and powerful music score by Belle Chen. - OB

Drizzle in Johnson by Ivan Li (Canada, 2023)
Short Films In Competition

Franz Kafka, David Lynch, and Robert Morgan walk into … an office with a late-socialist era ambient where a mathematician and alien writers play life-and-death, perverse games of power … ? Extravagant, repulsive, and alluring; hideous and hilarious, Li’s film will be trashed by some and loved by others. Extreme to the bone (what can vulgarly be called a ‘mind-f***’ is literary shown on the screen), the film should be avoided by those who believe in pristine cinema and those who cannot accept that AI is an artistic tool capable of adding new expression to eeriness, disintegration, and excess. It is a provocation and – good news – it will cease shocking once the audiences stop disputing ‘good taste’ and instead critically penetrate their brains; gently but resolutely, searching for pleasure and misery in understanding how this distorted, perverse imagery has, at points, perfectly captured certain patterns present in the here-and-now. - OB

Flower Show, Elli Vuorinen (Finland, 2024)
Short Films In Competition

A Victorian-like society and a 'Last Year in Marienbad' garden setting give an ominous turn to our dreams of growing up (and becoming like pretty flowers). With a sound design that pricks up your ears and pertinent, nosey (and nosey-looking) characters, Elli Vuorinen's no-dialogue film makes you feel that you are part of the obligatory flower show yourself. Headed by an impeccably annoying and vain countess lady (who still cannot get what she wants), and accompanied by male objects of her gaze, all characters leave almost no place to the young woman to flower, and the film builds up to a dramatic crescendo that makes you think that life is barren itself. With a strong eye in the editing department and a sumptuous visual atmosphere of nothingness, 'Flower Show' will make your afternoon tea a bit more bitter -but very refined as well. - VK

Gina Kamentsky's Pinocchio in 70mm (US, 2024)
Short Films in Competition

How many Pinocchios – versions-incarnations of – there are in letters or images, or on animated screen alone? Apparently, not enough, in this day and age. In any case, Gina Kamenstsky craves for her very own, quite special indeed, and so be it. A relentless indi-academic-experimenter (of conventionally-exotic American breed) gives a masterclass of cameraless flm-on-film-making, – yes, in-on 70mm stock, no less, from old Russian propaganda stuff, of all things (quite an overtone for today, deliberate or not): painting, gluing, collaging, bleaching, printing-in, you name it, with found footage on top or bottom. And with shy-less bravado in a kaleidoscope of reinless associations - which I’d value here maybe more than a hint to a narrative of (in)personal transformation, however touching it might seem, through the semi-holeless looking screen. - MG

Hello Summer, Martin Smatana, Veronika Zacharová (Slovakia/Czech Republic/France, 2024)
Young Audiences

The UPA color aesthetic meets modern European sensibilities and the eternal need to have a good vacation time in Martin Smatana (The Kite) and Veronika Zacharova's 'Hello Summer'. The breezy 2D/3D film uses the well-known vacation trope to go from accidents to a happy family reunion, amongst Mediterranean octopuses and too much hot. The sound design and music work as the driving wheel that forces this energetic avalanche of comic mishaps to reveal itself, and light-hearted symbolism (and real objects strategically placed) make this a summer adventure for the ages. - VK

Horse Portrait by Witold Giersz (2023, Poland)
Short Films In Competition

Gierz’s 1967 masterpiece – in pioneering painting-on-cell technique which stylistically looks maybe even more radical in retrospect – was titled simply ‘Horse’ and plot-wise focused mainly on the taming of this noble animal. This newest entry – from 97 years-young master – is rather on the taming of its image, through the depths of fine-arts iconography, quoting, and lightly playing with, works of all eras and cultures, from Leonardo to Rubens, to Picasso and Saul Steinberg, to Chinese and Japanese traditions and Paleolithic drawings. And his own flashes against this backdrop still strike with the sheer energy of the pastose brushwork in dynamic vision. A remarkable illuminative lesson, in a sense – or also a pointed remark on the old dichotomy between this artform stylistic dependence on the 'big art' and claims to aesthetic originality. - MG

I Died in Irpin, Anastasiia Falileieva (Czech Republic/Slovakia/Ukraine, 2024)
Perspectives

One of the best Ukrainian films that document the 2022 Russian invasion, 'I Died in Irpin' by Anastasiia Falileiva simultaneously describes the end of a relationship, reminding us that war doesn't eliminate all other human and relationship concerns. With the Russian aggressor in the background (but very lively in the documented segments), she focuses on moral dilemmas (flee or fight) that involve dependent persons (whose heads form enclosed citizens). There is always an uneasy atmosphere (helped by the film's eerie sound design), but never a direct confrontation. Just a day-to-day war struggle by the citizens who are left behind and need to calculate how to brush their teeth safely. A sharp and astute film in the grey palette, with a character that becomes our best guide to a modern atrocity. - VK

It Shouldn't Rain Tomorrow, Maria Trigo Texeira (Portugal/Germany, 2024)
Perspectives

This is a film of imprints, also visible as different poses being animated and being left uncleaned. The story of an aged mother in need and her daughter is handled with an increasingly alarming (but silent) urgency; deterioration comes both gradually and as a surprise, in a set of scenes that move from the mundane to the unexpected. Maria Trigo Texeira makes an arthouse thriller on a daughter's concern about her mother; she creates fear out of seemingly ordinary character design, and despair (and empathy) out of a bathtub filled with water. An immensely affecting film. - VK

O/S by Max Hattler (Germany/Hong Kong, 2023)
Off-Limits

Among a number of sound-focused exercises in Off-Limits program, this work for me stands out as arguably the most radical and self-consistent. Departing unreservedly from early avant-garde experimentation with optical sound, Hattler (apparently, with his Hong Kong team of students and collaborators, as usual) attempts to take that from the frames’ margins to the centerpiece, as if striving to synthesize anew a sort of audio-visual universum of digital era. “Abstract motion becomes sound. What you hear is exactly what you see” – he claims. Have to take it on trust. In any case, if not exactly pleasing music to your ears, it’s arresting enough. But also is dizzyingly mesmerizing the sheer ballet of those hissing lines, their dynamic geometry– somehow rhyming with weirdish geometric poetry in action of the cityscapes in his earlier films. -MG

Percebes by Alexandra Ramires, Laura Gonçalves (Portugal/France, 2024)
Short Films In Competition

An animated poem on the multilayered, bittersweet, and always individual meaning of ‘symbiosis’. The film’s watercolor palette encompasses orange, blue, black, and white. Smooth but consistent, the flows of colors work in tides but never become distracting or imposing. Visual finesse greatly helps to dive into equally smoothly delivered storytelling. It follows humans perception, feelings, and relationship with a very peculiar sea animal (the eponymous ‘percebes’ is a filter-feeding goose barnacle). Diverse characters, natives of the city of Algarve, who were interviewed in the production process, speak of how they harvest and eat the ‘percebes’, how the tourists, who flood the city at times, cannot really comprehend this culinary tradition, just like many other things they do not get yet change forever. Living by the sea may be a religion that calls the believers to cherish cycles, tides, and co-dependence. To the viewer’s joy and surprise, ‘percebes’ also means ‘understanding’. - OB

Preoperational Model by Philip Ullman (Netherlands, 2023)
Short Films In Competition

A kind of film that makes you stifle. A young sheep queen rehearses her greetings before a lady-in-waiting takes her on a stroll. Their relationship is tense and toxic. A painful skin disorder of the youngling is always visible, never discussed. The plot twists and we find the anthropomorphized characters functioning in perfectly average environments of contemporary Western standards of living. Hyper-realistic 3D here goes deep down the valley of the uncanny; the more images attempt to be normalized and typical, the more we are overwhelmed with growing uneasiness and discomfort. The surroundings, relationships, costumes, skin – all the supposedly defensive barriers between the girl and the world – appear harmful, and dangerous to her, revealing her as a threat. Tragedy lingers - OB

Tennis, Oranges by Sean Pecknold (2023, USA)
Short Films In Competition

Pecknold’s stop motion film is gentle, stylish, and frugal in its mise-en-scène, and these qualities are truly captivating. The melodramatic story of an aging rabbit couple torn between their dancing past and a present marked by stillness and inabilities is juxtaposed with a plotline revolving around a frivolous robot vacuum cleaner taking its first steps towards liberation and self-fulfillment. In the alleys and corners of LA’s Chinatown, in the labyrinths of fading memories, and within the hospital’s plain halls and exit doors, the rules of physics do not apply. Oranges, tennis balls, bodies, and souls are free to float - OB

The Painting by Michèle Lemieux (2024, Canada)
Short Films In Competition

One could feel this nightmarish insightful night in the museum forms a deliberate, sure, yet slant rhyme to another night – on Bald Mountain – that stands as the stage of an initial myth for Alexieff-Parker’s pinscreen techniques and poetics. Or also – a slightly polemic nod to Jacques Drouin's follow-up incarnation of it in ‘Mindscape’. For – in this newest Lemieux’s take it’s rather a oneiric space, and of a different introspection. Akin to X-ray examination in a restoration lab, we go through as if hidden layers of Velasquez’s classic portrait, to royal-incestual genealogy, to shadows in the wings of history, to shadowy flight of associations. Whether convincingly-transparently interpretive in that or not quite, the film stunningly glosses over the raster-dot nature of the medium – as though to the effect of slow-boost photo processing, to shades of metaphorizing in almost perfect chiaroscuro. - MG

The Wild-Tempered Clavier by Anna Samo (Germany, 2024)
Perspectives
In the core and essence, that’s not only a cameraless but a film-less animation; instead of filmstock toilet paper rolls will do just fine, handled on a handy-craft replica of classic-era editing table, of primitive-shabby-elegant touch. And so is the overall style: freewheeling drawing would encompass the range from shiny semi-abstractions to a kid playing on and around the grand piano, and a soldier mounting a battle tank – all-in-all playfully shadowing-accentuating timeless Bach music. Anna Sano has a taste for ironic (self)reflection, questioning the conventions of this craft and artform. (Characteristically, with a grateful nod to the late Gil Alkabetz.) But here, in particular, is maybe yet another layer, if only hidden-subconscious: in the place and time of her early upbringing, within the late-Soviet ‘economy of deficits’, toilet paper itself would’ve come as a rare luxury… - MG

Tuu-Tuu-Til by Veronica Solomon (Germany, 2024)
Young Audiences

Veronica Solomon (Love Me, Fear Me) crafts a fantasy-driven film for children which makes all everyday activities look both familiar and magical. Using a crocodile as the film's prop, a lot of scenes align to the narration reciting poems and verses. Children's curiosity and the need to be afraid (but still be confirmed that a friendly beast exists) are beautifully presented in the film, with an alternation of shots and a fresh visual approach to every situation described.  Its music is as uplifting as the image sequence, and its magic is constructed bit by bit, to give a glorious whole out of its parts. -VK

Related: The Annecy Winners 2024

contributors: Olga Bobrowska, Mikhail Gurevich, Vassilis Kroustallis

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