Oct 26, 2023

Chicken For Linda! swept the awards for Best Animated Film

The sixth edition of Animation is Film (AIF), the Los Angeles-based animation film festival organized by Annecy, GKIDS, and Variety, is underway and this year's award winners have been announced.

Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach's "Chicken for Linda." was the highlight of the year, winning both the Jury and Audience Awards. The film previously won the Cristal Award at the Annecy feature film festival and was screened in competition at the Ottawa International Animated Film Festival. Just last week, it was nominated for Best European Animated Feature Film by the European Film Academy.

Rodenbach previously directed the tour de force The Girl Without Hands, which premiered in the ACID section at Cannes.

The brightly colored film features Paulette, who feels guilty for wrongfully punishing her daughter Linda. To make it up to her daughter, Paulette decides to make chicken with peppers, despite not knowing how to cook. Unfortunately, a strike puts the town out of business, and getting the ingredients becomes a major chore.

According to the jury: [Sebastian Rodenbach and Chiara Marta, in "Chicken for Linda," pay homage to the difficulties and rewards of being a single parent in a hectic world, using a visually inventive style of painting that, through lively brushwork and use of color, creates relatable characters The artist brings these relatable characters (and one very flustered chicken) to life with lively brushstrokes and colors.

Pablo Berger's Spanish feature "Robot Dreams" was a neon pickup at this year's Marché du Film and won the Special Jury Prize for Animation Is Film. The film is a family film set in 1980's New York City, where best friends Dog and Robot go on a trip to the beach. The film won the Prix Contrechamps at this year's Annecy International Animated Film Festival.

The Animation is Film jury's favorite was Tal Kantor's Letter to a Pig. In this short film, a Holocaust survivor reads to a group of schoolchildren a letter he wrote to a pig that saved his life. The different styles emphasize how fallible human memory is and how often the images and imaginings recalled are abstract.

The jury explained its decision:

Tal Kantor uniquely blends hand-drawn animation, paint on paper, and visual fragments to depict how trauma and its aftereffects can last from generation to generation. In a word, genius.

Karni Arieli and Saul Freed's Wild Summon won this year's Special Jury Prize. This fantastic natural history short film follows the life cycle of a salmon, but the fish in the film take on human form; Wild Summon premiered in Cannes and was shown in competition at Annecy over the summer.

According to event organizers, this year's Animation is Film was a huge success, and the still young festival is headed in the right direction, with AIF director Matt Kaszanek saying in a release:

"Judging 'success' The only metrics we have are audience size and growth, and by those two metrics, the 6th Animation Is Film was a huge success. We are humbled and grateful that AIF has been embraced by the L.A. film fan community. Thank you to our sponsors, our filmmakers, and our audiences. We truly couldn't have done it without you.

This year's Feature Competition jury includes Variety chief film critic Peter DeBruge, Andrew Luhmann, co-director of the Oscar-winning "The Lost Thing," Indiewire Awards editor-in-chief Bill Desowitz, critic and historian Charles Solomon, Emmy Award-winning producer and Women in Animation president Marge Dean, Oscar-nominated director of The Breadwinner Nora Toomey, and Animation Magazine editor-in-chief Ramin Zahed.

The short film jury included Monica Lago-Kaitis, producer of "Wreck-It Ralph" and "Zootopia"; Aubrey Mintz, director of the Art School at California State University, Long Beach; Oscar-nominated "My Year of Dicks" and "Moana" screenwriter Pamela Ribbon.

Special Jury Prize

Special Jury Prize

Audience Award

Short Film Jury Prize

Short Film Jury Prize