Artist Talk: In Conversation with Georges Schwizgebel

These eclectic programs bring together the best and latest animated shorts from emerging and established filmmakers with selections from lauded international festivals. These films are in competition for Animation First Festival’s Best New Francophone Short award.

This curated selection of shorts highlights the greatest from the 2024 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, including a tailor-made opening sequence by students from GOBELINS Paris.

Join us in L’Alliance New York’s Library throughout the festival for virtual reality experiences from French studios and distributors, including Ito Meikyū by Boris Labbé, Grand Prize winner at Venice Film Festival.

This touching drama by Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), based on the 2019 novel by Jean-Claude Grumberg, follows a poor Polish couple whose rescue of a baby thrown from a train en route to Auschwitz changes their lives forever.

Artists Boris Labbé and Dimitri Vallein, along with producers Lesly Lynch and Ron Dyens discuss how they’re integrating AI into current projects. The conversation will center around the tools they use, AI’s capacity to push creativity, and trends they foresee in their fields.

Animation First is thrilled to host our second Animation Speak/Easy during the festival. Join us for a one-of-a-kind evening of animated inspiration, discussion and drinks.

Created by NYC-based animation filmmakers, Animation Speak/Easy is an interactive event where three guest artists are invited to share an animated short that inspires them, followed by a lively audience discussion.

Director Claude Barras’ enchanting stop-motion ecological tale centers on Kéria, her adopted baby orangutan Oshi, and her cousin Selaï, who must fight back against the planned destruction of Borneo’s ancestral forest. Brought to life by Barras’ intricately crafted puppets, the story unfolds against the rich backdrops of the island’s tropical trees, plants, and rivers.

In this animated musical adventure, Yuku embarks on a daring quest to find the legendary Himalayan flower said to radiate eternal light, hoping it will restore her grandmother’s health. To reach the flower, she must head out on a perilous quest into the mountains, armed only with her ukulele and songs.

The second film adaptation by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, co-creators of the best-selling comic book series Asterix, brings iconic duo Asterix and Obelix to the big screen in this newly restored version. The story follows Asterix and Obelix as they take on twelve challenges from Julius Caesar that could win them the Roman Empire.

Discover the work of Gisèle and Nag Ansorge, two pioneers of Swiss animation who developed sand animation to create an original and mesmerizing body of shorts.

Lauded French animator Kristof Serrand will lead the audience through his personal gallery of art and pop culture treasures, discuss makers he admires, and tell stories of the greats he has worked with throughout his 40-year career from Gaumont to Netflix.

Be the first to see episode one of French director Amélie Harrault’s animated television series following Hugo, Berlioz, Chopin, Delacroix, Courbet, Baudelaire, Balzac, and Dumas throughout the literary and art scene of 19th century Paris.

Betrand Dezoteux’s vivid imagination follows Jesus Perez’s visit to an unknown planet with very unusual hybrid inhabitants that embody a colorful, yet unsettling aesthetic.

Director Claude Barras’ enchanting stop-motion ecological tale centers on Kéria, her adopted baby orangutan Oshi, and her cousin Selaï, who must fight back against the planned destruction of Borneo’s ancestral forest. Brought to life by Barras’ intricately crafted puppets, the story unfolds against the rich backdrops of the island’s tropical trees, plants, and rivers.

These eclectic programs bring together the best and latest animated shorts from emerging and established filmmakers with selections from lauded international festivals. These films are in competition for Animation First Festival’s Best New Francophone Short award.

In this talk, artist Boris Labbé will discuss his work as it pertains to various artistic fields, detailing recurrent themes and specific areas of exploration. He will present several of his short films and discuss his latest work, Précieuses Chimères, a project at the intersection of art, AI, and biodiversity.

Nominated for both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, for Best Animated Feature, this film follows a young boy who, after losing his mother, is sent to an orphanage where he begins to learn the meaning of trust and true love.

Filmmaker Momoko Seto will share the creative process behind her first feature, Dandelion’s Odyssey, an action-adventure film about displacement and survival which she shot in France, Japan, and Iceland with a mix of macro live action and 2D/3D animation.

This program of shorts puts the spotlight on the work of award-winning Swiss filmmaker and editor Marina Rosset, along with selected works from her contemporaries. A mid-career artist, Rosset has created poetic, magical and stunningly beautiful films. Together, the program speaks to the originality of Rosset’s work and the wealth of contemporary Swiss animation.

Directed by visionary science-fiction animator René Laloux (Fantastic Planet) and designed by the legendary Jean Giraud (Mœbius) The Time Masters is a visually fantastic foray into existentialist space adventure.

Animation First is pleased to present its third Animation Jam, where students will be given 48 hours to complete an animation sequence. The teams will be made up of students from BRASSART School, Montpellier and Paris campus, in France, and Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore and School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York. Students can use any animation techniques but must include the image provided by Boris Labbé in their finished sequence.

Join us at the festival lounge to recharge and grab a bite, create your own stop-motion film, watch the live-feed of Animation Jam, or simply unwind between screenings.

Seven teams of 4th-year students from Brassart-MOPA school in France will have a chance to show their creativity by making very short films, about 20 seconds each, to be screened before features and shorts programs at Animation First.