Annecy 2020: the Cristal and the animated film festival shape the future of cinema

Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow

With the first digital edition in its history, Annecy, the largest animated film festival in the world, has exceeded its own expectations and outlined a possible future for cinema. In a record steeped in the quest for freedom, Rémi Chayé won the Crystal feature film for Calamity, Theodore Ushev that of the short film for Physique de la tristesse.

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Let's start with the best of the good news for all fans of animation and cinema: after the prize list made last Saturday, almost all the films of the Annecy Festival remain available online all over the world. 

Physics of sadness , a masterful work with encaustic painting 

With each edition, the unmissable animated film meeting demonstrates that it is not a question of celebrating a genre, but the art of cinema. Among the nuggets crowned this year, Physique de la tristesse,  by Canadian Theodore Ushev, a regular at Annecy. In this very touching and semi-autobiographical 26-minute masterpiece, the voice of Xavier Dolan tells the story of an uprooted man. A tragic journey from Bulgaria to Canada, accompanied by twists and turns of his soul.

► Read also:  Mickaël Marin: "This digital edition opens up the field of possibilities"

"  I think of my father. This prize is his,  ”reacted the Montreal director who had trouble holding back his tears after discovering that the story of his late father and him received the highest honor in Annecy for a short film. This tale of end of the world and end of an era represents eight years of work. Thanks to encaustic painting, a technique hitherto never used in animation, Theodore Ushev has created a very plastic and unique vision of his memory. With each layer of pigmented wax that disappears, a layer of memory reappears from his memories of his youth in Bulgaria.  

Calamity , the crystal with an outstanding graphic style 

With the Crystal of the feature film for Calamity, a childhood of Martha Jane Cannary , Annecy rewarded a French director at the top of his art. At the same time, the festival here reaches the limits of a digital edition. Because, unlike jurors, and for completely understandable reasons (piracy, etc.), the platform's public does not have access to the film in its entirety, but only to a  17-minute making of with video extracts, to protect its theatrical release on October 14. That said, even these glimpses clearly reveal the genius of Rémi Chayé in the construction of breathtaking landscapes (when the earth and the sky enter into dialogue based on the composition of a real vocabulary of clouds and plants) and of the central character of this animated western.  

Martha Jane is an extraordinary girl, an orphan, crossing all the borders of the female gender of her time to enter the history of the West. "  For the 80 minutes, we produced 57,600 drawings,  " explains Rémi Chayé. The graphic style, created for five years with its team of 150 collaborators, impresses with a veritable explosion of the palette of colors both artistically saturated and joyfully pop, vibrating the pigments of the natural colors used in the service of these veritable "tables" animated . Without forgetting the sound sequence of the making of . A delight.

The Nose or the Conspiracy of Mavericks, a symphony of tormented and brilliant images

The most impactful and confusing work on the list was distinguished with the Jury Prize: The Nose or the Conspiracy of Mavericks , a feature film by Andrey Khrzhanovsky. The Russian director confronts Stalinist terror in Russia to respond to him in animation. He breaks down totalitarianism by putting it in front of the artists' total confidence in their art. Oscillating between collage and drawing on paper, between real shots, animation of silhouettes, archive images and contemporary and animated staging, Andrey Khrzhanovsky creates a symphony of images as tormented, brilliant and torn by contradictions as the composer Dimitri Chostakovitch and his first opera Le Nez . 

Before our eyes parade the masterpieces and the life of Russian painters, composers and writers of the time: from the work inspired by Nicolas Gogol to the tragic fate of the director Meyerhold-Reich. Khrzhanovsky generates a veritable whirlwind of images and sounds recounting the manipulation of characters in the theater and in life. A reading as personal as brilliant, a breathtaking staging and an unscrupulous decomposition of this totalitarian ideology through its visual and sound aesthetics punctuated by torture and executions. 

My Favorite War , choice and happiness

Rewarded with the prize in the “Contrechamps” category, My Favorite War , the feature film by Ilze Burkovska Jacobsen, recounts the youth lived by the director in Latvia during the Soviet Union, during the Cold War. And as with Ushev, Chayé and Khrzhanovsky, the leitmotif remains the quest for freedom. The story begins with a saying: "  Really happy are those who do not have to make a choice " . How to live with the limits defined by an authoritarian regime? What is the link between choice and happiness? How to find freedom in the face of pressures from an oppressive society and regime? The very original visual writing is based on the use of cut elements and very marked colors to reach a young audience today, in search of their own identity.

The Annecy Festival comes out strengthened from the coronavirus crisis

With this digital edition, the festival persists and signs, Annecy remains the unmissable event in the animation world. And even beyond the animated film, among all the film festivals affected by the coronavirus crisis, Annecy has certainly given the most open, the most generous and innovative response. He took up the challenge of the pandemic by expanding digital borders. With more than 14,000, the number of accredited has exceeded 12,300 in 2019. At the Film Market (Mifa), more than 4,100 professionals, as much as last year during the physical market, rushed to the digital offer to discover, exchange, sell and buy. And the party is not over, for once, thanks to digital, the edition continues until June 30. 

Rightly, Mickaël Marin, the president of the festival, underlined the fact that we have never talked so much about Annecy. The festival thus displays its leadership and comes out strengthened from the coronavirus test. A bit like the animated film in general. In a study on the animation market in 2019, published by the National Center of Cinema and Animated Image (CNC) on the occasion of the Annecy festival, we learn that, in 2019, films from animation released in France recorded 32.9 million admissions, i.e. an increase of 35.4% compared to 2018 and the highest level of the decade (with 2016).

The CNC study on animated film

At the same time, revenues soared 40.7% to 206.4 million euros. Without forgetting that, all genres combined, three of the greatest successes of 2019 were animated films: Frozen 2  (3rd in the ranking with 6.7 million admissions), Toy Story 4  (6th, with 4.5 million entries) and Dragons : the hidden world  (8th, with 3.4 million entries).

This success is also reflected in the job market. In France, the workforce in animation and visual effects production companies has increased by 36.1% in the past five years. And, even if men still represent the majority in the sector, the share of women today stands at 45.8%. The real peculiarity of the animated film remains its audience: girls and women represent 55.7% of the spectators (against 51.5% for all films). Above all, 42.6% of viewers are between 3 and 14 years old, compared to 18.9% for all films. And 14.8% of movie buffs in the animation are between 15 and 24 years old.

The imagination of youth and the future of cinema

But the CNC study also analyzes the world of animated film outside cinemas. And there too, we find impressive figures. For example: “  In April 2020, more than half of VàDA youth programs [Video on demand by subscription, note]  are consumed on Netflix (57 %). In second position, is Disney +, a platform on which 17 % of youth programs are viewed in the first four months of 2020. [...] In the first quarter of 2020, 94 % of the consumption of youth programs is achieved by series of 'animation. "

In other words: the imagination of youth and the future of cinema are largely played out here, at the Annecy Festival and in the world of animated film.

► The winners of the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, digital edition, from June 15 to 30, 2020

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Annecy Animated Film Festival: "This digital edition opens up the field of possibilities"