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Annecy Festival
Brief and Beautiful Visions A look at some of the exquisite shorts premiering in competition at Annecy this year.
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ach year, Annecy Festival attendees are treated to a wonderfully curated selection of animated shorts from visionary artists all over the world. Although it is impossible to spotlight all 38 projects screening under the Official Selection banner, here is a sampler for what is in store for the lucky audiences:
The Debutante
Lucky Man
Directed by Elizabeth Hobbs (U.K.) hree years ago, London-based artist Elizabeth Hobbs captured the attention of animation fans with her striking, BAFTA-nominated short I’m OK, and the Annecy-nominated Happiness Machine. Her new short The Debutante, which is based on a wild short story written by artist Leonora Carrington in the late 1930s, is about a young woman who persuades a hyena to replace her at a dinner dance held in her honor! “What could possibly go wrong?” asks Hobbs. “I first read the story in 2016 and I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. We started production in earnest in 2020! I used hand-painted frames and paper collage captured under a rostrum camera with Dragonframe. We had a very small team. I animated, wrote and directed the film; I worked with producer Abigail Addison, composer Hutch Demouilpied, editor Mark Jenkins, actors Joanna David, Alexa Davies and Naomi Stafford, and Fonic on the sound design and mix.” Hobbs says she was very pleased to have been trusted with Carrington’s extraordinary short story and to have had the budget to work with a great team. She adds, “I think the film is joyful and dramatic at the same time. The toughest part was finding the funding for the film, but working with Abigail Addison from Animate Projects was a joy, and we were lucky to receive funding support from the BFI through its Short Form Animation Fund, which is made possible thanks to National Lottery funding.” The director says she has a long list of animated shorts that have impacted her. Among them, she singles out Fuji by Robert Breer, The Street by Caroline Leaf, Alison de Vere’s Two Faces, Tale of Tales by Yuri Norstein, Cannon Fodder by Vera Neubauer, Damon the Mower by George Dunning and Very Nice, Very Nice by Arthur Lipsett. For now, she hopes audiences will enjoy her clever outing with the hyena. “I hope they’ll discover Leonora Carrington’s other stories and paintings,” she says. “I also hope that audiences will enjoy this wild story of a young woman’s urgent rebellion!”
Directed by Claude Luyet (Switzerland) wiss director Claude Luyet’s second collaboration with his long-time friend, comic-book artist Thomas Ott, tells the fascinating tale about a man who wins a million-dollar lottery ticket. Luyet, who worked with Ott on the 1994 short Robert Creep: A Dog’s Life, says his goal was to make a dark, ironic and powerful story. “I wanted to depict an unflattering portrait of a man who is rushing to destroy himself. You can call it a kind of elegy to languidness.” Luyet began work on the project about four years ago. He notes, “It took us a year and a half to find the financing and two years to produce the short. We drew on paper, and used photo and paper collages, 2D animation, Photoshop and After Effects. Altogether, seven people worked on the short (including myself and Thomas), and our budget was about $170,000 Swiss Francs ($176,600).” The director, whose other previous animated shorts include Ariadne’s Thread, Patchwork, Animatou and A Question of Optics, says he hopes audiences will get the subtle humor of Lucky Man’s dark vision. When we ask him to give us his favorite animated titles of all time, he responds, “This is the tricky question I dread the most, because there are so many animated shorts that are close to my heart! I am going to choose one to please you, a film made almost entirely by one person — and that’s Rowing Across the Atlantic, which is by Jean-François Laguionie!” And what pleases him most about his latest short? “To have finished it!” he says. “You never know if you’re going to make it!”
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jun|jul 22
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