Animation Now Festival: The 'ultimate form of human creative expression'

Still taken from Antoine Delacharlery's Ghost Cell
Still taken from Antoine Delacharlery's Ghost Cell

This year, the range of animated films showing at the New Zealand International Film Festival (NZIFF) has been dramatically expanded.

Where there was once the snack-sized 75-minute round up of the year's best animated shorts, now there is a feast: the Animation Now Festival.

Malcolm Turner has been programming animated films for the NZIFF for two decades and is thrilled to be bringing a great many more to Kiwi audiences this year.

"This is the ultimate form of human creative expression, it doesn't get any better than this. With animation, if you can imagine it, you can present it," says Mr Turner.

"I'm so excited, now I get to share so many more of these films with New Zealand audiences."

Mr Turner calls himself a failed theatre director who became frustrated with the medium being "bound by gravity".

"If you want to go from one place to a very different place, you're bound by what your stage can withstand in that transition, and what your story and actors can withstand," says Mr Turner.

"You can't strip out a stage in a theatre production and turn a living room into a picnic on Mars. With animation, you can do it in a heartbeat. And you can do it with pizzazz and flair in a beautiful, elegant way."

The animated short selections are divided into international programmes entitled Asia Animation Review, Black & White Showcase, Dark Hearts, Handmade Animation and Opening Screening. Then there's also a collection entitled Indie LA and Sixty Six, which is a showcase of the works of Lewis Klahr.

"We went through about 4400 submissions this year, which is an extraordinary number. There's an enormous community of people making this material," says Mr Turner.

"When I started doing this in 1996, I think we got about 300 submissions. They all would have come in on VHS tapes and we communicated with people via fax. It's so different now."

Among those thousands of submissions, Mr Turner says he sees a promising trend, and one that he's been long-awaiting.

"With the advent of CG animation, people who had perhaps a limited talent at traditional animation started to get into it. So we got a lot of films that were all about turning a blue circle into a red square, then turning that into a brown cube. Really uninspiring stuff," says Turner.

"The hype around these new animated tools overreached the ability of many of the people who had access to those tools. I never really bought into it and I feel somewhat vindicated now. The field of auteur, independent animation has always attracted people who could draw, manipulate puppets, push sand or coffee grinds around - really abstract stuff. That impulse is as old as humanity."

It's taken its sweet time, but the influx of hacks appear to be moving on, Mr Turner says, allowing the work of real masters to rise to the surface once more.

"We've seen this wave of bad computer animation rise up, crash and now it's settled down a little bit. If there's been a trend at all in the last few years, it's that we're now seeing the kind of CG animation that we should be seeing," says Mr Turner.

"We're seeing people attracted to using those tools because they're really bloody good at using them to create whatever it is they have in their mind."

The Dark Hearts programme is where you'll find work of a disturbing and adult nature, not for the faint of heart.

"Animation is the perfect tool for telling these severely demented tales. What better artform is there to depict the essence of a nightmare?" says Mr Turner.

"You can get away with stuff that would be really too horrific if they were shot as live-action. It's still confronting in animated form, but the medium can soften the blow considerably."

Of all the shorts within Dark Hearts, Mr Turner says 'A Slice of the Country' is perhaps the most shocking.

"It's a film you watch and you are compelled to show, whether you want to or not. It's about a family of animals who behave like humans, and have a little human pet who behaves like an animal. They go for a picnic and then they cook and eat their pet," says Turner.

"To see that process, of taking a sentient 'animal', and turning it into food - it's violent and it's graphic. But this is how we get our food. We might pretend it doesn't happen, but when you walk down a supermarket aisle, that's where that stuff comes from."

Perhaps the artiest of the arty art films that populate the Animation Now Festival are collected in Handmade Animation. For moving images constructed with coloured gelatins, paint and puppets, this is the one to see.

"So much of the best animation we saw was substantially handmade. We've got several films that are nothing but paint on glass, from artists who paint several hundred or a few thousand different paintings for their short film," says Turner.

The film festival is packed with amazing and alternative films, but it's in Handmade Animation that you're likely to find the most unique and artistically singular work.

Enjoying these discoveries on the big screen and in the company of strangers makes them all the better.

The festival launches in Auckland tomorrow night and more information is available on the official 2016 NZIFF website.

Newshub.