Oct 13, 2014

Anim'est Winner: 'Boy and the World,"Poils'

Anim'est 2014. (Photo by Adi Marineci.)

I just returned from an awesome week in Bucharest, Romania where I attended the 9th edition of the Anim'est festival. Besides meeting lots of wonderful creative people and enjoying the warmth and hospitality of my Romanian hosts, the primary reason for attending was to watch films since I was on the festival's jury for features and international short films.

In collaboration with the two other members of the jury-British stop motion filmmaker Robert Morgan and French animation producer Christian Pfohl-we awarded the top feature prize to the Brazilian animated feature The Boy and the World directed by Alê Abreu. The film has already been acquired by GKIDS for U.S. distribution. We gave the festival's top short film prize, the Anim'est Trophy, to the Belgian film Poils (Hair) by Delphine Hermans.

The worksheet below shows how the three of us jury members picked the winners in the international shorts category. After we had created this shortlist, we watched the films on the list a second time to see how they held up to scrutiny and to further discuss their craft and concept. The whole process of watching the films in competition and determining the winners took the better part of five days. Surprisingly, even though each of us came to the discussion with different views on the art form, we managed to find common ground, and while there's never such a thing as a “best” film, I think we did a pretty good job of giving recognition to some exemplary works of animated filmmaking.

A complete list of winners is below. The awards were handed out on Saturday, October 11, at the Elvira Popescu Cinema in Bucharest. Each of the winners received one of these hand-painted sheep awards (pictured below) that were lovingly decorated by the festival staff:

Best Romanian filmPui de somn (Baby Nap)Romania 2014, dir. Paul Muresan