Today’s a travel day. Amid and I are en route to Portland for the Platform Fest. If you want to find us, check this post for me, and this one for Amid.

Even though I’m a participant and judge, I’m going up there as much a spectator as anyone else. Can the festival organizers pull it off? Can a U.S. animation festival work? These are the questions that will be answered this week. One thing’s for sure, they’ve loaded the event with great screenings, panels, guests, exhibits, installations, tributes, picnics and parties. It should be a blast.

Need another reason to visit Los Angeles this summer? The Tobey C. Moss Gallery on Beverly Blvd. (across the street from the famous El Coyote Resturant) will be exhibiting the animation art of Jules Engel from July 14th through August 31st.

This exhibition is being held with the cooperation of Engel’s estate, and will cover his career from Disney, through UPA and Format Films. An opening reception will be held Saturday July 14th from 2pm to 5pm.

The Oregonian offers an interesting interview with Platform Animation Festival director Irene Kotlarz. She offers some bold thoughts in the discussion, including this comment about what sets Platform apart from other animation festivals:

It was decided early on that it would be a 21st-century festival, and that would make it different from the other animation festivals out there. They’re all based, in my view, on a premise that grew up around the time of the first animation festival, which was in Annecy, France, in 1960. That premise is really based on theatrical screenings of animated shorts and features and around the idea of animators as auteurs — real postwar European arthouse cinema with art with a capital “A.” The Cold War was a big influence back then, and there was this idea of animation as the universal language. So a big theme was man’s inhumanity to man, and you saw lots of what I call the “naked bald man film,” with arctic wind on the soundtrack. Most festivals are still pushing the idea of the single artist. But we’re trying to make a major departure from that kind of thinking. I’ve always taken the view that there’s a larger historical and cultural context to art, and the context now is totally different. Now we have the Web and video games; the computer revolution has finally happened. And I think that at a lot of festivals, Internet animation is a poor relation. But we’ve gone out of our way to see that they get the same status as traditional animators.

Another edition of Annecy has wrapped and the winners have been announced. The top short film prize, the Annecy Cristal, went to Suzie Templeton’s Peter and the Wolf (pictured above) which also won the Audience Award. Other deserving shorts which took home prizes include Andreas Hykade’s The Runt, Samuel Tourneux’s Même les pigeons vont au paradis and Luis Cook’s The Pearce Sisters. Tom Brown and Daniel Benjamin Gray’s t.o.m. won the highest honor for a student film while the feature prize went to Norway’s Free Jimmy directed by Christopher Nielsen. A complete list of winners is here. I’ll be writing more about many of these films over the coming months.

There’s much that I could write about the festival, but I thought I’d take a moment to just talk about why I think it’s so important to attend animation festivals like Annecy. Living in LA, as I do, it’s easy to become complacent and think that you know everybody in the animation world. But then you go to a festival like Annecy where you see thousands of animation artists, and not a single one of them is from LA or NY, and you begin wondering where the heck you’ve landed. It’s a humbling experience and a reminder that today’s animation world is far more vast and diverse than ever before.

There are talented artists producing animation in every corner of the globe and festivals create the ideal forum for an exchange of ideas and techniques (or drinks, as the case may be with most animation types). I had the opportunity to meet and mingle with many of the international animation set last week including Juan Pablo Zaramella and Silvina Cornillón from Argentina; Israeli Ariel Belinco, co-director of the prize-winning Annecy short Beton (watch it here), Australian James Calvert of The People’s Republic of Animation and Vijayakumar Arumugam from India.

Then there’s all the Europeans at the festival, all of the British and the Germans and the Dutch and the Danish and the French and so many more that creating a list of the people I hung out with would run pages long. Even the loft I was staying in housed a fascinating melting pot of animation folk including French animators like like Sebastien Dabadie, Sebastien Laudenbach and Claire Fouquet, and Saschka Unseld of Germany’s Studio Soi.

People come from many countries to attend festivals but everybody speaks the same language of animation. It’s a varied and nuanced language that becomes ever so evident at a place like Annecy. There’s nothing more refreshing than going to a place that shows you animation is not just George of the Jungle but also George Schwizgebel.

I’ve posted links below to other bloggers who have some pics and thoughts from the festival. Considering how many people were there, it’s surprising that so few people have written about it. If you have a blog post about Annecy, please share in the comments:

Uli Meyer

Boris Hiestand

Matt Jones

Elliot Cowan

Hans Perk - I and II

The Duffy twins

Felix Herzog presents a nice collection of sketches from artists who attended the festival

Yours truly with Lisa and Uli

I’m still recovering from Annecy but the Platform Festival is coming up in Portland in a few days and it promises to be another intense animation-heavy week. Jerry has already offered his appearance schedule for Platform so I thought I’d offer a list of programs I’m involved with up there. For those of you who prefer Jerry- and Amid-free animation events, you’ll be pleased to know there’s plenty of those as well, including promising presentations by Smith & Foulkes, James Jarvis, Scott McCloud, Henry Selick, and Aardman founders David Sproxton and Peter Lord. Here’s what I’ll be doing:

Tuesday, June 26, 4 pm – 5:30 pm
Northwest Film Center: Whitsell Auditorium / Portland Art Museum
Design Daze: Mid-Century Modern Design: A screening of rare Fifties animated shorts including the superb John Hubley/Bill Hurtz industrial More Than Meets the Eye, a 35mm print of Ward Kimball’s Melody and the Ronald Searle-designed Energetically Yours.

Wednesday, June 27, 4:30 pm – 6 pm
Winningstad Theatre
Tom Oreb, the Man of a Thousand Designs: An in-depth examination of Tom Oreb’s work as a designer. His designs will be examined from all angles—what his responsibilities were as a designer and character stylist, how his work was interpreted by the animation crew, and how character design fits into the broader context of a film’s production design.

Thursday, June 28
2:30 pm – 4 pm
Winningstad Theatre
“Work for Free! Getting Your Work Out There on the Web”: My name isn’t listed on the program but I think I’ll be participating on this panel. The panelist lineup would be quite solid even without my inclusion. It includes Megan O’Neill (Atom Entertainment), Sarah Phelps (eatPes.com), Rick Prelinger (Prelinger Archives), Fred Seibert (Frederator Studios/Channel Frederator) and Alex Williams (SplashCast).

Cartoonists going to the Platform International Animation Festival in Portland next week will be invited to be part of an experimental collaborative animated film. Dan Meth will round up 100 artists and have each draw 7 frames of a new unscripted short cartoon — on location at a bar full of cartoon fanatics. Sounds like fun. You can sign up in advance by contacting Dan at dammeth-at-danmeth.com.

Montreal folks have been getting some awesome animation exhibits lately. Philip Street writes about one that he saw recently:

Brew readers might want to know that even though the Disney exhibit at the Montreal Musée des Beaux Arts closes this weekend, there is another exhibit just down the street in the Loto Quebec building (500 Sherbrooke St West) featuring the work of Frédéric Back. Sketches and gouache paintings from the ’40s and ’50s, as well as storyboards and production art from several films, are on show on the main floor until August 5. Amazing and inspirational stuff.

Frédéric Back also has an impressive new website at FredericBack.com.

The GL. Holtegaard museum near Copenhagen has a Kay Nielsen exhibit on display until August 19. The show features over 120 drawings and illustrations, including some of Nielsen’s work from Fantasia on loan from Disney. If you can’t make the show, there’s plenty of Nielsen’s illustrations online at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive and ArtPassions.net.

(Thanks, Alex Rannie)