If I were to take all of the names which society made up for my generation before settling for the boring and tepid millennials (what a complete lack of imagination that is reflective of the paradox of our limited horizons) – gen Y, the Internet generation, the Smartphone generation, the emo generation and so on – the one I’ll always be fondest of is the Cartoon Network generation. Not only because it reflects what might well be one of the last great generational coagulations around a singular and international (pop-)cultural pole, nor the fact that most of the people my age learned English from spending hours upon hours in front of the channel, not even its negative aspects – the fact that it primed us for a lifetime spent in front of the screens, amongst others; but especially because it reflects a certain playful side to my generation, its capacity (and propensity) for humor, a certain kind of effervescence and spontaneity, an imagination that is doubled down by escapism.

We all know that the nineties were a peak era of traditional animation, not just in regards to technology and aesthetics, but especially in terms of the sheer number of series and of the kinds of subversive messages that they coded within themselves (to give just one example– that one episode in Two Stupid Dogs where they go to the drive-in cinema), thus making animations palatable and funny to all ages, that is, before children’s entertainment was irredeemably mutilated by 3-D technologies or invaded by live-action series (for the initiated, traditional filmed images) and pulverized into a docile, almost imbecile paste. The boundaries were never quite clear in the nineties-era animations (and, after all, what limits were truly clear in that crazy decade in which I grew up?) – but we were all aware that the all-present moralistic discourse that cartoons would turn us all into psychos because of their “violence” was bullshit. And it’s good that our parents also knew this, from time to time – my most trusted co-spectator was my father, with whom I’d watch everything from Ed, Edd and Eddy and Cow and Chicken all the way up to Beavis and Butthead (!) – and so, it’s not hard for me to put forward the hypothesis that my generation’s cinephilia was also shaped, not to a negligible degree, by Cartoon Network, which amounted to a training ground: not only in terms of endurance, but also one that offered us some tools to understand audiovisual fiction, especially when the animations would reference (generally, in parodic terms, but even so) genre cinema or some of its most iconic moments. To end this personal intro on a clearer anecdote, a few years ago, an older cousin of mine confessed that he didn’t know what I would end up doing in life after spending my whole childhood propped up in front of the television set – to which I replied: „Well, seemingly, a film critic.”

Due to all of the above reasons, I’m often disappointed in the fact that animation films rarely get a shot at the big festivals, especially considering the role it has to play in the audiovisual education of the audience at young ages (apropos of the fiction/non-fiction dichotomy and competition – which affects animation films on all sides, no matter its relationship to the nature of the narration that it contains within itself); the most recent animation juggernaut which made the rounds on the circuit to come to mind is My Life as A Zucchini (r. Claude Barras, 2017, co-written by Céline Sciamma). Although I truly believe that animation must be much more forcefully reclaimed by cinema at large as a legitimate art form, at the same time, I’m incredibly happy for each occasion that I have to return for a few days to my inner child and to take part in an animation film festival – and thanks to its hybrid edition, I could finally visit (even so, virtually) the Annecy animation film festival, which broadcast its short film selection online (and saved its feature films for the big screen).

The Annecy animation film festival is the oldest of its kind in the world, having been established in 1960 in the eponymous Savoyan town in South-Eastern France (followed by Animafest Zagreb, founded in1972) – and is, rightly so, the world’s most famous and prestigious event of its type in the world. Initially taking place once every two years and turning into an annual event in 1998, Annecy inspired the foundation of countless other similar events around the world (in Romania – that of the beloved Animest festival) and has historically promoted some of the most important voices of auteur animation. A cursory look at its past selections reveals sonorous names such as Wes Anderson (with Fantastic Mr. Fox, 2009), Jan Švankmajer (Alice, 1989, Dimensions of Dialogue, 1983) Per Åhlin (The Journey to Melonia, 1989), Anca Damian (Crulic, 2012), Michaël Dudok de Wit (Father and Daughter, 2001), as well as key figures in arthouse anime – the festival acting as a massive promoter of the Japanese animation industry across its history – such as Hayao Miyazaki (Porco Rosso, 1993), Satoshi Kon (Paprika, 2007) or Katsuhiro Otomo (with his cult-film, Akira, 1989).

The nice thing about animation festivals is that they don’t segregate their selection according to rigid formal or aesthetic criteria, and their umbrellas are large enough to host the most diverse techniques and styles: from traditional frame-by-frame animation (digital or analogic) or stop-motion to 3-D[1]; from individually painted shots or ones which imitate pencil sketches or drawings to naive figures or anthropomorphic characters. (The festival even features some shorts which used actual footage – such as Donato Sansone’s Concatenation 1 and 2, featured in the competition, which created horizontal montages of objects passing through one frame to the other: bullets, sports balls, athletes, cars, and so on.) Annecy has a little bit of everything, without letting one particular technique or style turn into a predominant one; beyond a vast retrospective dedicated to African animation all across its major regions which also included a film about animator Moustapha Alassane and a best-of from the Fupitoons festival, or focuses on regions such as Latin America or Eastern Asia, the festival also had an abundance of thematical mini-programs (experimental shorts, commissioned films, animations made by children, teenagers or graduates, etc). Of all these programs, the one that piqued my interest the most was WTF Midnight Specials (given its similarity to Animest’s Creepy and Trippy Animation Night). I noted three of its titles: the satirical music video Paix Sociale (dir. Rémi Richarme), with an Emmanuel Macron dancing in the vein of Jacques Dutronc in a sharpie-drawn body as he’s slowly turning into a vampire; Tarantino (dir. Victor Hagelin), in which a clay figurine of the director is killed (think Celebrity Deathmatch) in several of how some of his most characters die in his films, and the video to Run the Jewels’ „Yankee and the Brave” (dir. Sean Solomon), where the rapper duo is chased by an army of robot nazi policemen – in a clear reference to the protests of 2020.

My second biggest priority was to check out the festival’s exclusive sneak preview for the new Space Jam (you know, the one with LeBron James instead of Michael Jordan), which was rather more a presentation of the animators in regards to the new techniques they used on the feature, plus a two-minute fragment featuring the Looney Tunes all-stars: Bugs Bunny and Lola Rabbit, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig, Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, Tweety and Sylvester and so on… except for Pepé Le Pew, after the scandal which enraged all the boomers during springtime. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the presentation showcased the scene that would have featured the lecherous skunk – a reference to Casablanca’s As Time Goes By scene – where he is replaced by none other than Yosemite Sam. Who, honestly speaking, is not much brighter than Pepé, if you ask me, but none is just as bad as Speedy Gonzalez, who is still a stereotypical caricature of Latin-Americans – and who, in the fragment, is heard cussing out in Spanish cliches. (Good job guys, you really managed to be politically correct.)

As per usual, I set my sights mostly on the main competition, which was composed of five programs – wherein Annecy didn’t avoid the most burning political and existential topics of the moment, at all. Films about isolation were a must, but, in contrast to their classical non-fictional sisters from other festivals, these shorts were much more playful in tone: the ironic I Gotta Look Good for the Apocalypse (dir. Ayce Kartal), a mixed-media composite of individually painted shots and 3-D visuals which explores the rift between the physical and the digital experience of lockdown, the surrealistic Vadim On a Walk (dir. Sasha Svirski, an emergent Russian animator), featuring a walk in the vein of Robert Musil at the end of the curfew period, and the suave How to Be at Home (dir. Andrea Dorfman), a stop-motion animated poem, its shots painted individually onto pages of books. LGBTQ+ issues were also featured: In Nature (dir. Marcel Barelli) explores homosexuality and gender role diversity in various species of animals, or All Those Sensations in My Belly (dir. Marko Djeska), a portrait film in the style of a childish sketch centered on the life experiences of a trans woman living in Poland.

Beyond political topics, the competition also had its fair share of referential films: June Night (dir. Mike Marynuk) has a cut-out of Buster Keaton wandering the world like an anti-Gulliver in a parable about the abulia of isolation, Horacio (r. Caroline Cherrier) is a modern adaptation of Camus’ „Stranger”, and Hold Me Tight (r. Mélanie Robert-Tourneur) comes across as a reinterpretation of the Genesis, with an animal-like Adam and Eve couple, which is forced out of the garden of Eden after a psychedelic love scene. Even so, and in spite of the selection’s predominantly light tone, my favorite title was a small docu-drama: The Train Driver (dir. Zuniel Kim și Christian Wittmoser), a traditional animation hand-painted onto black paper, which illustrates the story of one Bernd Ziegler, a train conductor, who remembers the six times in which someone threw themselves in front of his locomotive. Beyond its social dimension, with its constantly shifting forms, changing suddenly from one object to another, The Train Driver is constructed as a ride in the night, where images zipping past the window could, very well, turn out to be anything.

To wrap things up: even though I couldn’t access Annecy’s feature-length competition, surprisingly enough, after a year of digital burn-out, the experience of this festival was surprisingly smooth, fun, and simultaneously intellectually stimulating; one that was varied without losing anything in terms of coherence or consistency, and a festival where I finally felt that I can also just simply relax. In closing, here’s a small quote that pulled at my heartstrings from How to Be at Home, which reminded me of the good parts of 2020 (which I’ll try to hold on to before their memory dissipates):

„Watch a movie in the dark and pretend someone is with you. Watch all of the credits and you have time and not much else to do. Or watch all of the credits to remember how many people come together just to tell a story, just to make a picture move.”

Main image: Still from Paix Sociale.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.