Cartoon Brew Co-Founder Amid Amidi Awarded 2026 Animafest Zagreb Honor for Animation Studies

Former Cartoon Brew owner, founding editor, and our dear friend, Amid Amidi, has been named the recipient of the 2026 Animafest Zagreb Award for Outstanding Contribution to Animation Studies.

The award is presented by Animafest Zagreb, the second-oldest animation festival in the world, and still one of its most important, which recognizes significant international contributions to animation scholarship and criticism.

Reacting to the news, Amidi wrote on his LinkedIn profile:

I couldn’t be more surprised or grateful to be named recipient of the 2026 Animafest Zagreb Award for Outstanding Contributions to Animation Studies. No one gets into writing about animation for fame or glory; we do it out of love for the art form. To have this work recognized by a group of peers whose work I respect and admire is a tremendous honor that I never could have imagined.

As part of the honor, Amidi will deliver the keynote at the Animafest Scanner conference in June, held during the World Festival of Animated Film. His talk is titled Whose History Is It?: Telling the Story of American Animation, and is described as a personal reflection on how the history of American animation is written and understood.

For Cartoon Brew, the recognition is especially meaningful, celebrating the lasting impact of one of its founders’ work on animation journalism and how the history of the art form has been preserved in the first quarter of this century.