SDFF30 / Animation

I’ve always been a big fan of animation; Japanese anime, Don Hertzfeld’s amazing short films, the mixed-media stuff that Slinky Pictures in the UK produces, Bill Plympton, the Brothers Quay…but I’ve always found some of the most amazing animation to be from the Czech Republic—Jan Svankmajer and the short puppet films produced by Kratky Film Praha.

In this year’s festival there is a feature length Czech animated film called One Night in the City directed by Jan Balej. It’s a truly surreal mix of stories that happen in and around an apartment complex over the course of one evening. There’s a great sequence where a fish and a tree, neighbors in the building, head out to the corner bar for a drink and a story where a man sews an ear he finds on the ground onto his own head and subsequently finds he is able to paint like van Gogh. It’s an incredible piece of work.

And, in case you’ve got little ones (because One Night in the City is definitely not for the kiddies) we’ve also got the Animation Station running during the first weekend of the festival, There will be three workshops for three different age groups—children and adults—where you can come down and make your own animated film which we’ll then screen the second weekend of the festival.