Etiuda&Anima was founded in 1994, making it the oldest and largest Polish Animation Festival
Etiuda&Anima was founded in 1994, making it the oldest and largest Polish Animation Festival. According to Boguslaw Zmudzinski, the festival's founder and artistic director, the purpose of the festival has always been to allow students to meet and mingle with experienced professionals. The festival also promotes student films and exposes students to films by renowned animators. Although many festivals have Student Competitions this is the only festival that I know of where student films are also eligible for the main award, the Anima Golden Jabberwocky Grand Prix, as well as the award for the Best Student Film. The quality of the films at the festival is very high as are the workshops and special programs.
I am a big fan of animated documentaries, which have a long history dating back to Winsor McCay’s 1918 The Sinking of the Lusitania. Simply Divine, by Melody Boulissiere and Bogden Stamatin of France, was very touching. In the 14-minute film set in 1939, a soldier meets a young woman and their love story begins. When the soldier is called up to the front, they write each other passionate love letters, hoping that they will be delivered. When the woman is forced to evacuate as the war moves closer to her, they lose track of each other.
In 2014, during an interview, the then 91-year-old woman, who is the grandmother of one of the filmmakers, revealed the secret of her long-lost love that she had kept hidden all of those years. The beautifully animated film uses still photographs from the Costica Acsinte Archives of the Romanian war photographer Acsinte and paintings to document the space between actual events and their recollection 75 years later. What process does the human memory take when deciding what is to be kept and what is to be forgotten from a personal love story? The film tells a touching story of love, loss, and moving on.
Whether it is one of his feature-length films or a very short one, Koji Yamamura is a master storyteller. His latest film, Extremely Short, is a wonderful story told in 5’ 18”. As the film begins, the audience watches a man set out in search of the shortest thing in Tokyo. It turns out to be a single syllable uttered by a dying man in the last moments of his life – “da”.
The film is the first in a series of animated shorts called Bungaku Bideo (Literature Videos). Extremely Short translates into film a powerful story by award-winning author Hideo Furukawa, who reads the story/poem on film.
The jury agreed with me that Extremely Short is a beautiful film and awarded the Grand Prix Golden Jabberwocky to Koji Yamamura.
I first saw Drag Fox on a festival selection committee and it won my heart. Seeing this beautifully animated stop-motion film on the big screen was a treat. It is a film about questioning who you are and coming to terms with yourself with a little help from an unlikely source.
The story revolves around eleven-year-old Sam who is secretly starting to question his gender identity and finding it difficult to express how he feels. One night, while lovingly caressing one of his older sister’s dresses, wishing that he dared to try it on, a very urban fox jumps through the window and grabs the dress. Desperately trying to get it back and afraid of waking up his family, Sam is led on a wild chase through the house, finally ending in the dark attic.
When Sam finally finds the light switch, he realizes that there is much more to this mischievous fox than he could ever have imagined. The film ends on a high note with Sam and the fox all dolled by in dresses, dancing and singing a duet - a drag musical number.
As if the story isn’t enough, the fox, named Ginger Snap, is voiced by the wonderful Sir Ian McKellen. Ginger Snap's singing is done by well-known Drag Queen Divina de Campo, star of Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Divina has an amazing four-octave range reaching up to a high soprano. Drag Fox is directed by Lisa Ott, a Master’s Degree candidate at NFTS (National Film and Television School) in London. If this is her graduation film, I can hardly wait to see what she does next.
I find Polish animation often challenging to watch but thought-provoking and stimulating. The three Polish Competition programs at Etiuda&Anima were very strong, with films such as Tomek Popakul’s Zima (Winter).
Popakul is an example of the young generation of dynamic Polish animators. His 2013 diploma film, Ziegenot, was shown at numerous animation festivals including Annecy. The film, made at the Łódź Film School, is a story about the anxiety a teenager feels as he is about to come of age.
His 2019 film, Acid Rain, was nominated for an Annie, the Short Film Jury Award at Sundance, and Annecy, as well as winning the Craft Prize for Best Script at Ottawa. Unlike his previous films which were all in black and white, Acid Rain burst on the screen in eye-popping color as befits the tale of a teenage girl who runs away from her village and meets a kind of unstable weirdo. He takes her to a rave where she drops acid for the first time.
Popakul’s latest film, Zima (Winter) is co-directed by Kasumi Ozeki. It captures teenage rage and rural isolation in present-day Poland. The directors describe their film as “It grows slowly as an icicle, but one day it drops and crashes. Anka loves cats and Jesus. In a winter silence, the lagoon freezes over and the unspoken resurfaces like cracks on ice.”
The film is a portrait of a small fishing village where human to human, human to animal, and animal to animal are interdependent on a delicate balance of warm tender care and cold emotional cruelty. It is an eerie story of loneliness and community narrated with magical realism.
A Polish film that touched me deeply was The Sleeplessness of Jutka. Director Maria Gorlich-Opyd tells the story of seven-year-old Jutka who thinks that she is only in Łódź for a holiday but in reality, is held captive in the ghetto with her aunt and grandfather. She can’t understand why she can’t go out and play with other children or explore the city with her grandfather. She also doesn’t know where her parents are.
Her grandfather tries to explain the reality of the situation by comparing it to the story of Minotaur. Łódź becomes an ancient labyrinth and the Nazis are the monster from the myth. The film intertwines dramatic World War ll events with Greek mythology, treating the suffering and drama with sensitivity.
The Łódź Ghetto or Litzmannstadt Ghetto was established by the German authorities in the first week of their invasion to hold Polish Jews and Roma. It was the second largest ghetto in all of German-occupied Europe after the Warsaw Ghetto.
Nik was a member of the AnimaPL jury and I don’t envy them. There were so many outstanding Polish films that making a choice must have been very difficult. The list of all of the winning films in all categories is at the end of the article.
Peter Lord was a guest of the festival. He introduced a screening of Pirates! In An Adventure with Science which he directed in 2012. Based on Gideon Defoe’s 2004 novel, the film follows a crew of incompetent pirates as they attempt to win the much-coveted Pirate of the Year Award by pillaging the largest amount of booty.
The captain and his crew travel to Victorian London to take on some of the best pirates in the world. Along the way, we meet Queen Victoria, a young Charles Darwin, and a colorful cast of pirates who are also vying for Pirate of The Year. The film is jolly good fun.
Peter also gave a Masterclass on Creating the Magic of Stop Motion. His masterclasses are always full of good stories. The entire time that he spoke at the Main Theatre, he was creating his character Morph from a ball of clay. Morph is always exactly 12 cm tall and weighs 5 ½ ounces. Each ball of clay is carefully weighed on a scale to make sure that Morph does not gain or lose a few centimeters or ounces.
Morph made his television debut in 1977. Although he no longer has his own show, wherever Peter goes Morph is not far behind.
At his presentation, Peter talked about the founding of Aardman with David Sproxton and gave the audience a sneak peek at the 2024 BBC Christmas Special, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Foul. In the 70-minute film, Wallace & Gromit enter into a new business venture, the iconic supervillain Feathers McGraw is back, and an army of gnomes marches through the film. Along with Morph, Peter brought along puppets of Wallace and Gromit, Ginger from Chicken Run, and Shaun the Sheep. He also showed a puppet with part of the armature exposed.
Swedish stop motion animator Niki Lindroth Bahr made one of my favorite films, The Burden. The 2017 film is a dark musical with four episodes that take place in a supermarket, a residential hotel, a call center, and a fast-food restaurant. The locations are all in a generic high-rise next to a busy freeway. Who could not love tap dancing mice, a la Fred Astaire, as they clean up the fast-food joint or a fish in the residential hotel who sings out her woes? The Burden has won 82 awards, including the Annecy Short Film Cristal.
The festival mounted an exhibition of puppets and sets from Niki’s films. There was also a screening of all four of her films: Tord and Tord (2010), Bath House (2014), The Burden (2017), and Something to Remember (2019). Before the screening, Niki talked about her work and passed around one of her beautifully crafted puppets from Tord and Tord for the audience to have a closer look. The detail in the puppets and sets is amazing. She told the audience that she creates everything by herself and that she is now at work on a new film.
Each year the festival gives a special award to an outstanding animator who is also an educator; This year’s Special Golden Jabberwocky was awarded to Michaela Pavlatova. Following her graduation film from the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in 1987, she made her first professional film Words, Words, Words (Reci, Reci, Reci) in 1992. The film’s visualization of the thoughts and conversations that go on in a bar full of people utilizes light-hearted humor and irony which have become a trademark of her short films. The film earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Short Animated Film in 1993.
Repeat won the 1995 Special Jury Prize at Annecy as well as The Golden Bear for Best Short Film at The Berlin International Film Festival. In 2012 Tram, a light-hearted look at female erotic fantasies was awarded the Annecy Cristal and the Special Jury Prize at The Hiroshima International Animation Festival.
Her feature film, My Sunny Maad was awarded the César, awards at numerous festivals and was also nominated for the 2022 Golden Globe. Michaela has accomplished all of this while being Professor Pavlatova, head of the Animation Department at FAMU Prague. Her teaching abilities show up in the credits of numerous films by her students that list her as an advisor. She personifies the meaning of the Special Golden Jabberwocky as an animator and an educator.
An important part of Etiuda&Anima is the Creative: Lab : E&A., the industry arm of the festival. Meet the Producer is a Talent Market organized in cooperation with the Polish Producers Association to give students and beginning animators an opportunity to meet and talk to representatives from Polish Animation Studios.
I have never given any thought to the potential for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in the field of healing, mental and physical health, therapy, convalescence, and recovery. Doctor Iwona Pomianowski is a motion designer and a psychologist. She teaches at the University of Silesia Department of Game Design and Virtual Reality as well as at the Department of Psychology at Warsaw University. Her presentation, Immersive Realities; A Journey into the Future of Healing Through Art and Technology gave me a whole new way of looking at the possibilities of VR and AR that I had never considered before.
AI is a hot topic at festivals everywhere. Polish producer and director Bnzogorz Waclawek explored the topic in his talk, “The End of Individuality: How AI is Homogenizing Art and Animation.
A two-day workshop on scriptwriting helped beginning and intermediate animators develop scriptwriting skills. I also gave a two-day workshop on writing film reviews. On the first day, we talked about what makes a review valuable, discussed how to develop a personal writing style, and what makes an article interesting to a reader. We watched three very different films, Brutus (2014) by Svetlana Filippova, Fetch! (2002) by Nina Paley, and Adam Elliot’s Harvie Krumpet (2003); Each of the participants then selected one of the films to write about.
On the second day, everyone read their reviews and we all discussed them. We also talked about interviewing techniques and the participants got to practice with Etiuda Competition Coordinator Konrad Glabek who visited the workshop on both days. I think that the ladies all turned out to be excellent writers who wrote nice reviews. It was a great pleasure to get to know them and listen to their ideas.
I had such a lovely week at the festival. I would like to thank Festival Directors Katarzyna Surmacz and Boguslaw Zmudzinski for inviting me to be part of the festival and for their wonderful hospitality. A very big thank you goes out to my good friends Konrad Glabek and Emilia Gondek, who let us stay in their home for two days before the festival started and for taking Nik and me for a lovely dinner at Puente. We now know a good Mexican restaurant in Krakow.
From Krakow, we flew directly to Helsinki to coach pitching at the Nordic/Baltic pitch. But more about that lovely experience soon.
Etiuda&Anima Winning Films
Etude Competition
The Jury - Katarzyna Warzecha (Poland), Viera Čákanyová (Slovakia) and Alexandra Roberta Serban (Romania) awarded the following films:
Grand Prix - Golden Dinosaur and 8 000 PLN: We Have Homeland/Tenemos Patria /Nasza Ojczyzna Directed by: Mikel Garrido Linares, Screenplay: Mikel Garrido Linares, Joan López Alonso, School: Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya, Country: Spain, Year: 2023
Silver Dinosaur - Debtors/Zadłużeni Directed by: Andrzej Danis, Screenplay: Andrzej Danis, School: Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Filmowa, Telewizyjna i Teatralna im. L. Schillera w Łodzi, Country: Poland, Year: 2024
Bronze Dinosaur - Say Wuff!/Powiedz Hau! Directed by: Fabian Podeszwa, Screenplay: Fabian Podeszwa, School: Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Country: Germany, Year: 2024
Non-Regulation Prizes
The International Federation of Film Societes (FICC)
The Jury - Miki Kilian, Dragan Milinkovic and Fimon Carl Kirkebo awarded the Don Quixote prize to the film The Fuse/Bezpiecznik Directed by: Kevin Haefelin, Screenplay: Kevin Haefelin, School: Columbia University, Country: United States, Year: 2022
The Student jury - Milena Gozdek, Marcel Baran and Krzysztof Czarnowus awarded the film It'll Pass/Praeis/To Minie Directed by: Dovydas Drakšas, Screenplay: Dovydas Drakšas, School: London Film School, Country: Great Britain, Year: 2024
Anima Competition
The jury - Niki Lindroth von Bahr (Sweden), Marta Magnuska (Poland) andVolker Schlecht (Germany) awarded the following prizes:
Grand Prix - Golden Jabberwocky and 8 000 PLN: Extremely Short/Totemo Mijikai / Bardzo Krótki Directed by: Koji Yamamura, Screenplay: Hideo Furukawa, Production: Yamamura Animation, inc., Country: Japan, Year: 2024
Silver Jabberwocky: Beautiful Men/Piękni Mężczyźni Directed by: Nicolas Keppens, Screenplay: Nicolas Keppens, Production: Animal Tank & Miyu Productions & Ka-Ching Cartoons, Country: Belgium, France, Netherlands, Year: 2023
Bronze Jabberwocky: Nun Or Never!/Zakonnica Albo Nigdy! Directed by: Heta Jäälinoja, Screenplay: Heta Jäälinoja, Production: Böhle Studios, Country: Finland, Year: 2023
The student jury - Magdalena Özen, Kacper Mazela and Józef Rostkowski awarded the film:
Beautiful Men/Piękni Mężczyźni Directed by: Nicolas Keppens, Screenplay: Nicolas Keppens, Production: Animal Tank & Miyu Productions & Ka-Ching Cartoons, Country: Belgium, France, Netherlands, Year: 2023
Audience Choice
The audience of the 31st IFF Etiuda&Anima awarded the film: Ziemniaki/Potatoes Directed by: Marcin Podolec, Screenplay: Marcin Podolec, Wiktoria Podolec, Production: Yellow Tapir Films, Country: Poland, Year: 2023, Running time: 4'
Anima.Pl Competition
The jury - Przemysław Adamski (Poland), Nik Phelps (USA/Belgium) and Pedro Harres (Brasil) awarded the following prizes:
Grand Prix Golden Żmij and 8 000 PLN: Joko Directed by: Izabela Plucińska, Screenplay: Izabela Plucińska, Justyna Celeda, Production: Animoon, Country: Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, Year: 2024
Silver Żmij: Crab/Krab Directed by: Piotr Chmielewski, Screenplay: Piotr Chmielewski, Production: WJTeam, Country: Poland, Year: 2022
Bronze Żmij: The Miracle/Cud Directed by: Ewa Borysewicz, Screenplay: Ewa Borysewicz (na podstawie CUDU Ignacego Karpowicza), Production: Letko, Country: Poland, Year: 2024
Special Golden Żmij for the best-animated student etude and 2000 PLN: There Are People in the Forest/W Lesie Są Ludzie Directed by: Szymon Ruczyński, Screenplay: Szymon Ruczyński, Production: Lodz Film School, Country: Poland, Year: 2023
The Student jury: Martyna Górka, Zuzanna Pepaś and Weronika Jurczyk awarded the film: Misaligned/Koniunkcj Directed by: Marta Magnuska, Screenplay: Marta Magnuska, Production: Animoon, Country: Poland, Year: 2022
Audience Choice: The audience of 31st IFF Etiuda&Anima awarded the film: Zima Directed by: Tomek Popakul, Kasumi Ozeki, Screenplay: Tomek Popakul, Production: Yellow Tapir Films, Country: Poland, Year: 2023
