Festival Focus
Short Circuit From the cutting-edge 3D Chased to the eagerly awaited Junk Yard by Hisko Hulsing, the cream of Dutch short animation will be on show at Annecy this June. Melanie Goodfellow looks over the line-up. The Netherlands’ short animation scene will be out in force at Annecy’s International Animation Festival this year with a record nine films selected to play at the lakeside event, running 4-9 June. Five short films featuring Dutch directors or producers - Aalterate, Audition, Chase, Junk Yard and Oh Willy… - are set to screen in competition, four of them international co-productions. Another two Dutch works, Now You Know It Anyway and Oedipus, have been selected for an out of competition slot. Dutch graduation film Mac ‘n’ Cheese and music video I’ll Take you With Me are also in the official line-up. “This really is an exceptional year for Dutch animation at Annecy. Usually we have one or two films at the festival,” says Miranda Sloot, who oversees the €1 million budget earmarked for animation shorts at the Netherlands Film Fund. The five Dutch works in competition at Annecy will go up against 49 other short films for the festival’s coveted Cristal award. Hisko Hulsing’s Junk Yard is the highly anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed short Seventeen. It revolves around childhood friends, who go their separate ways as adults, but meet once again in strange circumstances.
“Hisko is a filmmaker who has the potential to go on to make a feature film. He has a story to tell and a style which will make even Hollywood sit-up,” says Michiel Snijders, co-owner alongside Arnoud Rijken of animation house il Luster, which coproduced Junk Yard as well as Oh Willy..., Now You Know It Anyway and Oedipus. Adriaan Lokman’s 3D Chase is a groundbreaking work, pushing the boundaries of animation as well as stereoscopic filmmaking. An abstract chase featuring cascading 3D triangles, the film premiered at Holland’s Inter national Animation Festival in April. It was produced by French Autour De Minuit and Dutch Valk Productions.
Portuguese Christobal De Oliveira’s Aalterate was coproduced by French De Minuit and Dutch Valk Productions, which put up a minority stake. “Aalterate is very strong visually. A woman drives a car into a lake, goes underwater and gets tangled in the weeds… it’s a very beauti ful, detailed image,” says Sloot. Belgian director Emma de Swaef and Marc Roels’ Oh Willy…, was a co-production between Belgian Beast Animation, il Luster and French companies Polaris and Vivement Lundi. “We have a long history of working with Flemish companies Beast and S.O.I.L. It’s a typical Annecy story. First, we got drunk together, then we became friends and then we started working together,” says Snijders. Featuring knitted puppets by Swaef and the directing and photography skills of Roels, the short follows a man who returns home to look after his sick mother who lives in a nudist camp. Utrecht-based il Luster also produced both out of competition titles. Bastiaan Schravendeel’s Now You Know it Anyway follows a girl as she tries to sell her made-up stories at a flea market. The quirky Greek myth parody Oedipus is the latest film from veteran animator Paul Driessen, co-produced with the National Film Board of Canada. Alongside a packed slate of shorts in development and production, il Luster is also about to embark on its first feature-length animation, the Santa Clausthemed Triple Trouble (TrippelTrappel).
“This really is an exceptional year for Dutch animation at Annecy.” “It got an amazing response. The audience had never seen a 3D film like that before… it leaves you quite breathless,” says Sloot. Udo Prinsen’s Audition, about a young Auschwitz prisoner who auditions for the camp’s orchestra in a bid to stay alive, has already toured numerous festivals including Ireland’s Blackrock Animation Festival last year. Prinsen directed and produced the short – which ingeniously uses fingerprints to create the characters -- at his Studio Carambolas animation house.
Snijders feels it is time for his company and the rest of the short animation scene to expand its ambitions and its scope. “We’re at a tipping point. Over the last five years, the shorts animation sector has gone from strength to strength in terms of professionalism and production values. It’s time to take the next step and turn this network of small independent companies into a real industry… making feature films, television series and animation for games as well,” says Snijders. Sloot reveals a dozen Dutch feature-length animations are currently in production or in development at the moment. They range from mainstream pictures such as Telescreen’s Miffy the Movie and the BosBros’ comic strip adaptation Heinz, to more quirky fare such as animation boutique The Drawing Room’s biopic Hieronymus and transmedia specialist Submarine’s The Last Hijack about Somali piracy. It looks like the Dutch animation scene is on the verge of taking its activities to a whole new level.
Hisko Hulsing’s Junk Yard
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