I agree, nothing was as special as BS or LB, or as sheer fun as Pirates, but everything still was impressive. And I LOVED the references to Mind Game and Howl’s Moving Castle.

I think it’s important to note that this is work of the second year students at Gobelins - I believe last year’s batch of films was completed by third year students so I think comparisons might not be completely fair.

Great work all around though.

While style-wise the pieces are nifty and everything, I just can’t help but feel a little disappointed at this round of shorts. None of them have any story telling or character development aspects at all. It’s all just about animated graphic design, which is great for a station identification or toy commercial, but is a bit of a let down compared to their previous Annecy triumphs.

I don’t think they were meant to be viewed as “shorts” as they were idents or show openers. That’s why they all included some sort of reference to Annecy within them.

Yeh these where show openers,like ads before short films ,not shorts… so comparing them to last years shorts isn’t worth it. A lot of people are quite confused though. The Annecy program did mention that these were 2nd year productions. However i guess only people that went to annecy would know that hehe.

Complaining about *anything* that comes out of Gobelins, is to kick the proverbial gift-horse square in the chops.

That school is AMAZING, and the new generations of film makers coming out of there are going to revolutionise European animation - and animation in general for the years to come.

Sometimes I think I should just learn French and go back to school there, just to be around that sort of forward thinking…