Focus Annecy 2014

The Festival Bar, a gathering place!

The Annecy Festival looks forward to seeing you at the Festival Bar, a relaxing and friendly place. Located within the haras' walls and open Monday through Saturday from 11:00 am-6:00 pm and again from 9:00 pm-1:00 am. It's a festive space where you can get refreshed all day long or just take a rest between screenings. A live band will shake things up on Friday night at 10:30 pm. The Bar will also be hosting some signing sessions during the week. Open to badgeholders and volunteers, it's the perfect spot to spend a delightful moment.

Private space from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm for the Partners' Club. Invitation required to enter.

A new competitive category: Animation Off-Limits

This year, alongside the official selection of short films, the Annecy Festival is introducing a new competitive section: Animation Off-Limits. On the programme are 12 short films coming from 8 different countries.
The "Off-Limits" Award will be given to a short film that explores innovation and experimentation.
Take a look at the programme of the 12 contending shorts in this category.

Off-Limits programme

At the wizard's school of animation

Once again this year, some students from the Gobelins, l'école de l'image will use the Annecy Festival to present their current projects. The school of applied arts, print and digital media specialises in the graphic industries of animation, video, interactive design and video games. Excerpts from films made by the students in the "Character Animation and Animated Filmmaking" programme will be shown before every screening. This year, you can get a glimpse of: Le Coup du lapin, String, Coil, Hors Champ and Massif. All of these videos will also be available on the Festival site's Daily Newsletter.

Stop-motion in the spotlight

Annecy 2014 is focusing on stop-motion animation, the technique that requires thousands of frames and a whole lot of patience to make objects or little figures come to life for a film.

The Festival invites you to explore this technical trend through various events:

• Special Programmes: The Invincibles, eight not-to-be-missed stop-motion shorts, and the documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan;
• Conference: Anatomy of a Studio: Aardman Animations. Presentation by Peter Lord of the stop-motion studio behind the characters Wallace & Gromit;
• Open-air Screenings: ParaNorman by Sam Fell and Chris Butler (LAIKA), and The Tale of the Fox by Ladislas Starewitch;
• Exhibitions: la Gaîté lyrique is presenting fifteen international artists and the different production stages of their stories till 10th August. Exhibition at the École supérieure d’art de l’agglomération d’Annecy (ESAAA), echoing the Gaîté lyrique Motion Factory exhibition. And finally, Bastien Dubois and Julie Nobelen are showing stop-motion animation at the Centre Courier.

A Teaser from Bruno Collet

This year, Bruno Collet is behind the teaser for Annecy 2014, a "Savoyard slasher". It is a follow-up to his series of shorts RIP which he made in 2006 using animated puppets. Here, he has revived the one-eyed killer he created alongside Benjamin Botella back in the day.

In this trailer, Bruno Collet has revisited the codes of horror films and B movies. The production took three weeks of filming at the Vivement Lundi ! studio located in Rennes, and 10 days of postproduction.

Honorary Award to Isao Takahata

This year, the Annecy Festival will be giving its Honorary Award to Isao Takahata, to celebrate his career and contribution to animation. Acclaimed filmmaker, this master of animation has created a number of master works including Grave of the Fireflies, Pompoko and My Neighbours the Yamadas. Along with Hayao Miyazaki and the Tokuma Shoten company, he also founded studio Ghibli, producer of such international successes as Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and The Wind Rises.

Festival Artistic Director, Marcel Jean, refers to him as follows: "Filmmaker of an exceptional scale, Mr Takahata is also a great humanist whose work has become a reference for those who believe in the greatness of animation as a cinematic art form."

His latest film, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, is set to be screened in his presence at the Festival opening ceremony.