Ottawa ’09 Competition Selections

The Ottawa International Animation Festival has announced their official selections for this year’s festival, which takes place between October 14-18.

There are ninety-three films competing in the various short categories. Competition selections in Ottawa are a wonderful reason to attend and always one of the highlights of the festival. The line-up is filled with challenging, progressive and interesting uses of the animation medium. Check out the list of competing films here. I’m especially pleased that they maintain such high standards because I’m on the festival’s short film jury this year alongside filmmakers Suzan Pitt and Jim Blashfield.

Feature competition is also more robust than usual with seven films vying for the prize: Henry Selick’s Coraline, Tatia Rosenthal’s $9.99, Neil Burns’s Edison and Leo, Priit and Olga Pärn’s Life Without Gabriella Ferri, Sunao Katabuchi’s Mai Mai Miracle, Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max, and Paul and Sandra Fierlinger’s My Dog Tulip. It’s nice to see a healthy selection of features, especially after the feature debacle in Ottawa last year in which the best feature prize was inexplicably awarded to Battle for Terra.

(Ottawa poster by Theodore Ushev)