Animation Festival Presents a Wide Array of Forms and Styles

By Sean Uyehara

When SFFS presented the inaugural Animation Festival last year, the foremost desire was to present animation as a multifaceted artistic practice. In thinking about animation and its wide-ranging forms—from the latest Pixar blockbuster and TV’s The Family Guy to motion graphics in commercials and blinking banner ads—we noticed that in a way we are immersed in animation. That Festival presented a chance for us not only to celebrate the kinds of work that inspire and entertain us, but also to take a step back and reinvest animated work with a renewed sense of wonder and engagement.

After opening last year with The Host, a hybrid live-action and visual effects film, and seeing the overwhelmingly positive response to this not-strictly-animated film, we could see that we were on the right track. So, this year we again attempt to present animation in an array of forms and styles. We have doubled the number of programs and have branched out to include new kinds of work.

We open SFIAF with The Pixar Story, a live-action documentary about the synergy behind the meteoric rise of the Emeryville-based company.

However, one of the themes that has cropped up in this year’s program is the use of animation in nonfiction. Sprinkled into the shorts programs, we present a series of different animated approaches to nonfiction. In the shorts program Top Drawers Signe Baumane relates her howlingly funny reminiscences of sexual anxiety in Teat Beat of Sex, and Song E. Kim muses loosely on mealtime conversation in Dinner Table. In these films, animation provides an intensely powerful, sometimes exceedingly beautiful, medium for describing a subjective experience of reality.

In the same program, Josh Raskin uses audio from a 14-year-old Beatles fan whose recorded interview with John Lennon serves as the soundtrack for morphing pen sketches and digital animations in I Met the Walrus, recalling the exuberance of youth in a way that no live-action documentary could ever capture.

And stretching the idea even further, Magnetic Movie visualizes concepts elaborated by NASA scientists at UC Berkeley as they speak about magnetic forces.

Another area explored in much greater detail this year is the overlap between animation and graphic design. The compilation of music videos in Play It by Eye comprises a cross section of the best graphic, commercial work out there today. Seeing these videos play out on the big screen will be a truly extraordinary experience.

Our free panel at the Apple Store, Animating the Internet, will feature panelists from Goodby, Silverstein & Associates, Postfuturism, the Webby Awards and W!LDBRAIN. All of these companies are leaders in pointing the way to the best current and future methods for using animation in all of its incarnations.

Still, the bulk of the program is made up of what you would hope to encounter at an animation festival: the best international works that we could find. We present a wonderfully endearing, child-friendly feature in Komaneko: The Curious Cat, an adults-only feature in Film Noir and the best fiction and nonfiction short work of the past year.

And, as audiences have come to expect from Film Society programs, we will have filmmakers and discussions at many of the programs. Among guests who have confirmed their attendance at the Festival are Leslie Iwerks (The Pixar Story); Serge Penezic, aka D. Jud Jones (Film Noir); Claude Cloutier (Sleeping Betty); Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski (Madame Tutli-Putli); Kelly Sears (The Drift); Song E. Kim (Dinner Table); and Betsy de Fries and Jerry van de Beek (Today).