Anilogue Film Festival

The internationally renowned ‘Anilogue’ film festival is taking place for the seventh time in Budapest until 3 December 2009, showing the best animated films of the year, and will be making a guest appearance in Vienna for the second time.

Since 2003, the festival, originally called ‘AniFest’, has established itself in Hungary as the largest annual animated film event. What started as a three-day event with 750 tickets sold has become a week-long festival bringing cartoon film premieres from all over the world to Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2008, Vienna has joined Budapest as one of the capitals of animated film at the end of November. The ambitious aim of this year’s ‘Anilogue’ festival is to welcome a total of 8,000 fans of animated short and full-length films to 65 screenings in all (35 in Budapest and 30 in Vienna).



 

Analogy + Dialogue = Anilogue

In 2007, the name of the annual ‘AniFest’ film festival was changed to ‘Anilogue’ – a new name designed to set the event apart from other animated film festivals. The word ‘Anilogue’, a name chosen from among more than 50 suggestions, is made up of ‘analogy’ and ‘dialogue’. It refers to the dialogue that uses the language of animated film and the parallels, or analogies, which can be found between the different forms of animated art – from the earliest experimental films to the latest computer animated works.

An odd couple for the opening

This year’s ‘Anilogue’ festival features the best animated films of the year. The event in Budapest opened with Mary and Max, by the Oscar-winning Australian director Adam Elliot. After his successful short film Harvie Krumpet, Mary and Max is the film maker’s first full-length work. Over the course of the film’s 92 minutes, the viewer is witness to a story encompassing 20 years, about the epistolary friendship between a lonely 8-year-old Australian girl and a 44-year-old, slightly autistic New York Jew. The two mismatched main characters provide moments of contrasting emotions, making you laugh out loud one moment, and moving you to tears the next. The director’s aim is to make his audiences forget that they are watching an animated film. “I’m not interested in making animated films about talking animals. I want to portray real people on the screen,” explains Adam Elliot. A tip for all Harvie Krumpet fans – the sympathetic character from Elliot’s previous masterwork makes a small guest appearance in Mary and Max.

The best of the year

The focus of the seventh ‘Anilogue’ festival lies on the relationship between comics and animation. The Japanese director Kazuyoshi Katayama will be presenting his film King of Thorn together with the storyboard for the film. Other films being shown are Summer wars, by the up-and-coming Mamoru Hosoda, $9.99, by the talented young Israeli Tatia Rosenthal, and Red Line, by the Japanese director Katsuhito Ishii, who gained worldwide recognition thanks to an animated scene in the blockbuster Kill Bill. Two evenings in Budapest, titled ‘Polish Experiments’, are devoted to Polish short films from between 1958 and 2005.

What would a festival be without awards?

‘Anilogue’ doesn’t just use its selected programme of films to tempt audiences into the world of animation. The festival has also taken it upon itself to hand out the ‘Best of Anilogue’ awards each year. An international three-member jury will select the best European short animated film of the last two years and, in addition, each member of the jury will give his or her personal favourites a Jury Special Award.