This year, the festival moved from late November/early December to March, so instead of snow in Budapest, I got to see early Spring
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
Way back in 2008, Festival Director Tamas Liszka and Programmer Kreet Paljas had the crazy idea of hosting a festival in two cities. First, there were four days of screenings in Budapest, and then the entire festival, including special guests, boarded a bus for the 240-kilometer ride to Vienna, where the festival screened a repeat of the Budapest screenings and Master Classes. It was winter, cold, and both cities were all dressed up for Christmas.
Then Kreet and Tamas started a family - they talked about doing the double act again, but it didn’t happen. Somehow, with two young daughters to raise and life in general getting busier and busier, it never happened again. Until this year, eighteen years later, when Anilogue returned to Vienna, but sadly without the entire festival. No bus, but Tamas did rush to Vienna for one day to make a guest appearance and make sure that everything was running smoothly. There is a crew in Vienna now that takes care of everything in that city.
This year, the festival also moved from late November/early December to March, so instead of snow in Budapest, I got to see early Spring. I wasn’t sure how the date change would work out at first, but I think that the date change is good. There were no Christmas markets to compete with, and after the long winter, people were happy to be out and about, but it wasn’t so warm that you didn’t want to go into the theatre. They also made sure that they did not conflict with any other major March festival.
This year, it seems like there is a bumper crop of good feature films. The opening night film was Sylvain Chomet’s A Magnificent Life. Sitting in the beautiful Urania Movie Palace, a blend of Venetian, Gothic, Italian Renaissance, and Moorish-Arabic architecture, built in the 1890’s, the theatre seemed like just the right place to watch a movie about the life of the acclaimed French writer, playwright, filmmaker, and producer Marcel Pagnol.
Born in 1895, he was first attracted to film in 1931 and went on to open his own studio in 1933. The film is based on a commission Pagnol received from the editor-in-chief of the prominent women’s magazine ELLE in 1955 to write a series of literary pieces recounting his childhood in Provence. The film opens as he starts to write, and Little Marcel, his childhood self, appears before the aging Marcel. The child triggers memories of the advent of talking pictures, his film studio, his deep affection for his actors, the experience of writing, and, of course, the women in his life.
A Magnificent Life is just the sort of film that I enjoy. I have heard complaints that the film is too slow-paced. I guess for people who are used to fast-paced films with a lot of action, the film may seem to drag on too slowly. I saw the film with a young friend who is an animation student. She couldn’t understand who the “young boy” who kept popping up in the film was until I explained that it was “little Marcel”. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting in a movie palace, watching an excellent film with a wonderful story in a beautiful movie palace.
I am a big fan of Alberto Vazquez’s previous films, particularly Bird Boy and Unicorn Wars. They are films that I can watch over and over. I had seen his new film Decorado at home for a selection committee, and at Anilogue I finally got to see it in the theatre. I was not disappointed.
The story is about a middle-aged mouse caught in an existential midlife crisis. His marriage is falling apart, and to him, his life seems totally absurd. The film deals with everyday situations everyone faces, such as health issues, the economy, death, and mega-corporations controlling our lives, all beautifully animated and delivered with dark black humor. It won the top prize, Best Animated Feature Film at the Quirino Award for Best Feature Film. The award is an annual award that recognizes achievements in Ibero-Latin American animation production. It is named after Quirino Cristiani, the Italian – Argentine director who made the first animated feature film, El Apostol in 1917. The film also took home the coveted Goya Award for Best Feature Film. The Goya Awards are Spain’s main national film awards. Decorado should be a strong contender for the Best Feature Film Oscar this year.
I also enjoyed director Shoji Kawamorri’s 116-minute film Labyrinth. It is about Shiori, a typical high school student who yearns for online fame. After an embarrassing video of her goes viral, she cracks her smartphone in frustration, and it develops a crack. Her real-life self is replaced by a charismatic alter ego.
Powerless to return to the real world, Shiori is forced to watch her counterfeit self rapidly rise to stardom and become an influencer who plans to charm the internet and replace it with brain rot. Will she be able to stop her digital counterpart and regain her life in the real world?
It isn’t an earth-shattering film, but the characters she meets along the way to finding the path back to reality are fun. I also liked the design of the strange characters, and the “other world” is nicely designed. The film was also a reminder to me to spend a little less time looking at my smartphone.
Animated Nights is a great tradition at Anilogue. Beginning at 21:00 on Saturday and lasting approximately five hours, the four programs were grouped by topic. The first program was It’s Getting Creepy: Horror 1:0. With a lot of psychological films to play with your mind. After a break, Horror 2.0 got down to real horror with puddles of blood.
One of my personal moments of horror was the 10-minute film Fried by Lizzie Watts. She is a student at the National Film and Television School in England. They have a reputation for turning out excellent films, and Fried is no exception.
As Dev drives home from his job at a mysterious, aging nuclear facility, he becomes stranded at an isolated emu farm run by old mystic lesbians. Suspicious of their intentions, Dev fears that they will sacrifice him at the local stone circle. I especially liked the look of Lizzie’s film, which she created in Blender. The film combines mixed media techniques, 3-D and 2-D animation, hand-drawn charcoal, and 3-D scanned props.
Another film to make you not want to walk home alone at night was the Argentinean animation Luz Diabla (Diabolical Light). The 11-minute supernatural film was directed by Gervasio Canda, Paulo Boffo, and Patricio Plaza.
It is the story of Martin, a young raver who becomes entangled in a strange accident on the road on his way to a party in the middle of the Argentine Pampas. After finding refuge in a mysterious rural tavern, he is befriended by two strangers. Martin’s paranoia begins to take hold of him. As the hours pass, his perception starts to distort, unleashing unsettling visions that lead him to confront the supernatural forces lurking in the night. Will Martin survive the night, or is it all in his imagination?
During breaks between the four screenings, you could get a drink or snack in the Urania Theatre’s beautiful upstairs café and relax to the ambient soundscape of the Self-Reflection Disco while reclining on soft pillows on the café floor.
I was delighted to meet José Luis Agreda and attend his excellent Masterclass. An Art Director with a distinctive personal style, José Luis has spent nearly 25 years working across multiple disciplines, including animation, design, art direction, editorial illustration, press, advertising, and comics.
In the animation world, he is best known for his work as art director on the feature film Robot Dreams (2023) directed by Pablo Berger from Spain. The film brings Sara Varan’s graphic novel about the adventures and misfortunes of Dog and Robot in New York City in the 1980’s to the screen in a tender and humorous way. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, won the Prix Contrechamp at Annecy, and was nominated for an Oscar.
José Luis also served as art director on Bunuel In The Labyrinth Of Turtles. Based on a graphic novel by Fermin Solis, the feature film is the story of Luis Buñuel, who sets out in 1932 with three of his leftist anarchist friends to make Las Hurdes: Land Without Bread, a confrontational documentary set in an extremely backward and impoverished area of Spain.
Agreda’s most recent project is Decorado, directed by Alberto Vazquez, where José Luis once again led the film’s artistic direction. During his Anilogue presentation, he talked about some of his tricks of the trade and showed examples of how he created certain looks for his characters.
This year, there seems to be an unusually large number of excellent feature films. No matter what your taste, from the sentimental, touching story of A Magnificent Life to the horrific story of kidnapped children in Africa who are forced to become child soldiers, or the inventive story of a world where human’s and merpeople co-exist in a very strange interpretation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid in Japanese director Yasuhiro Aoki’s fanciful ChaO, there is a feature film this year to fit everyone’s taste.
Two programs of short films and a feature film were devoted to a focus on Latvia. Everyone is familiar with Signe Baumane ‘s films, especially her two feature films, Rocks In My Pocket and My Love Affair With Marriage. She is now hard at work on feature film number three, Karmic Knot. The film is expected to premiere in 2028.
As with all of her other feature films and most of her shorts, Karmic Knot is a highly personal comedy/drama/horror story set in Soviet occupied Latvia, during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The first Latvian short film program opened with Signe’s 2007 18-minute film Veterinarian. The film is about a vet who regularly goes on house calls to treat sick animals. He can usually save the animal, but one time he arrives too late and the animal dies. The veterinarian’s heart is broken. One night, the animals that he has treated come to him in a dream. They shower him with love and forgiveness, and when he wakes up, his heart is healed.
It is a lovely film that isn’t screened often enough. Signe’s sister is a veterinarian in Latvia, although the film is not dedicated to her, but most of Signe’s films are very personal, so you can draw your own conclusions.
Kafka In Love was also included in the first program. Directed by Zane Oborenko, the 10-minute film is set in the 1920’s when Czech novelist Franz Kafka wrote 120 letters to Milema Jesenska during a period of his life when he was suffering from tuberculosis and was extremely ill. Kafka’s letters reveal a side of him that is seldom seen in his literary work. In the letters, Kafka’s relationship to Milema, made difficult by their geographical distance and her marriage to another man, is defined by his deep emotional connection to her. His love for Milena fills his life with light but also shows his feelings of inner darkness.
For Kafka In Love, the animator used sand animation technique to give a delicate texture to her portrayal of love, loneliness, and self-discovery on the screen. I first saw the project at a CEE pitching forum and was intrigued by the topic, which was enhanced by the beautiful sand art. I knew nothing about this side of KAFKA’s life until I saw Zane’s pitch, and I am so delighted to see the finished film, which turned out to be as interesting and beautifully animated as I thought it would be.
For many years, I have been invited to Anilogue to host Meet The Artists. It is an opportunity for the festival audience to listen to the animators whose films have been screened and for me to talk about their films with them, their work process, and anything else that pops into our heads. It is something that I really enjoy doing, and it is especially fun when I am chatting with someone I have known for a long time.
Tamas Patrovits and I have been friends for many years. We were on an Anilogue jury together years ago. This year, his 5-minute film Next Step screened in competition. The film, consisting of countless original risograph prints, is an under-the-camera, straight-ahead animation improvised to the rhythms of the Hungarian percussion group Amadinda. The risograph prints are based on various mark-making techniques. Stamping, brush and monotype strokes, line drawings, finger prints, letter print accents, and traces of masking tape are mixed to take the viewer on a rapid visual journey. The film uses only two colors, teal and gold. Tamas told me that “Next step is a consistent conceptual work that avoids post-digital manipulation, consisting solely of a series of ristograph prints carefully captured frame by frame under the camera”.
Along with making his own experimental, hand-drawn, and 2-D computer animations, he is the founder of his own animation school on the Pest side of the Danube River, where classes are offered in various disciplines to all ages at varying levels of abilities. In 2012, together with Anna Ida Orosz, he founded Primanima World Festival of Firsts. The festival is an international festival for first-time animators. The goal is to provide a platform for talented young animators to introduce their films. The event also hosts workshops and special programs along with jury and audience awards. It is an excellent festival for young animators to network, which will help them with their future careers.
Another long-time friend that I got to talk with at Meet The Artist was Géza M. Toth. Founder and head of KEDD Animation Studio in Budapest, Géza was nominated for an Oscar in 2006 for his 2005 film Maestro. The film was also an Annecy Cristal nominee. It shows the last few minutes before a maestro takes to the podium and his preparations are aided by a mechanical assistant. The film has a surprise ending.
Founded in 2002 in Budapest, KEDD Studio’s slogan is “Lots For Tots”. Toth’s film Shorts From The Box – Wild Things was in the Children’s Films for 12 Year Olds + screening. The film is part of the extremely clever Mitch Match – Think Outside The Box series.
The ongoing series presently has 52 episodes. The protagonist of each series is a curious, playful, blue-headed matchstick who pops out of a matchbox and goes on an adventure with other matchsticks from the box. At the end of the film, they all pop back into the matchbox. Toth says that the series is aimed at teenagers. “Young people’s curiosity, courage, and openness are reflected in the way that the blue match stick steps out of his comfort zone to explore the world around him. The humor of each episode is not only in the unexpected twists and turns in the stories, but also in the fact that each episode is like a puzzle game. The audience is constantly having to guess what situation the matches represent”.
I have seen several episodes of Match Match, and they are all fun to watch. The Wild Things episode, which was screened at the festival, brought a smile to my face. When explaining the 8-minute film, Toth said, “When I was a child, I often heard that ‘man can conquer nature’. Today, I know that nature can never be conquered. Fortunately!”
A big thank you goes to Kreet and Tamas for inviting me to be part of Anilogue. I also want to thank Nuriye Atalar, an animation student who was my assistant at the festival and became a friend. I am already looking forward to Anilogue next year.
Anilogue will be held from the 25th of March to the 29th of March in 2027
You can learn more about the festival and find out how you can send your film at: https://anilogue.eu
LIST OF WINNING FILMS
· Best Feature Film: Decorado by Alberto Vázquez
· Best Short Film (Best of Anilogue): Kutyafül (Dog Ear) by Péter Vácz
· Best Children's Short: Teli fészek (Full Nest) by Elena Walf
