After interviewing the festival director for Manchester Animation Festival, one of the premier events on the city’s film calendar, I was eventually able to attend the festival itself. I’d been previously, but only ever to one event over the course of the festival. 2024’s festival gave me the chance to see 3 films, 2 in conversation events and their student film showcase, giving me a nice spread in order to experience the breadth of what the festival has to offer.
In Conversation with Chris Sanders
The first event of the festival I attended was an In Conversation with Chris Sanders, acclaimed director behind Lilo and Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon, and, most recently, The Wild Robot. The room was packed, with a huge queue running the length of a whole floor of HOME.
Sanders opened by talking about his early work in the Disney story department, specifically working on The Lion King as part of what was famously seen as Disney’s B-team. His perspective on the now-certified classic was a treat. He told a particularly memorable anecdote about going down the road at the Disney lot to see the completed ‘Prince Ali’ sequence in Aladdin, and being bummed about having to go back and work on what he thought at the time seemed to be inconsequential song in an inconsequential film. This song turned out to be ‘I Just Can’t Wait to Be King’, one of the most famous songs in one of the most celebrated animated films ever made.
The majority of the discussion was around The Wild Robot, which, especially as that film is so wonderful, was a joy to hear. He went in depth into almost every aspect of the film, from why he chose the project when it was being shopped around DreamWorks, to storyboarding it himself, all the way through to working intimately with the stellar voice cast.
Sanders’ discussion of working in the studio with the actors was particularly insightful. He raved about Lupita Nyong’o and Pedro Pascal specifically, citing both as very intelligent and involved performers and telling the audience that after every session with them in the studio he would then go away and re-write sections of the script with their specific voices and mannerisms in mind.
Sanders was also incredibly receptive to audience questions when the discussion was opened up to the floor, answering many in depth questions about process from students of animation, as well as questions about his older work. Sanders was a great speaker and listening to him discuss his work was both insightful and entertaining.
Flow
Later in the day, I attended my first film screening of the festival. This was the film Flow, a pan-European co-production which follows a cat embarking on a journey across a sort of apocalyptic flooded jungle where the water continues to rise and rise. The film is Latvia’s submission for best animated feature at this year’s Oscars and is currently hot in the running for nominations in both a best animated feature and best international feature. This award’s attention is well-deserved; Flow is one of the best animated films of the year without a doubt.
The best choice the film makes is to have absolutely no dialogue. There is no voice cast in the film, instead just following the animals being mostly silent apart from the occasional meow. It’s a very effective decision, demanding that the animators make the characters more expressive in order to visually tell a story. They do a remarkable job of it too – you always have a strong idea of the characters’ relationships to each other, their personalities, and their goals, which is a remarkable thing to be able to pull off.
The art style is something that you have to adjust to. At first it feels ever so slightly off, like an early 2000s video game cutscene, but you settle into this rather quickly and lends the film a more fantastical tone.
As the lack of dialogue perhaps suggests, Flow is a very low-key piece. Despite the grandiosity of the inciting incident of the film, it feels very calm and small. The journey the characters find themselves on is a simple one with obstacles that feel important in the moment but do not amount to much in the grand scheme of things. And I mean this as a compliment, it’s this smallness that makes it have such a special feeling. There is something about the journeys of small things in a massive world that is uniquely compelling (think the hobbits in Lord of the Rings) and this film taps into that brilliantly.
It is unfortunately a little while until the film gets a wide release in the UK, you will have to wait till March next year, but it really is a special little film well worth keeping an eye out for, and not to spoil the rest of this article, my clear favourite of the festival. I’m not alone in that feeling, as the film was awarded Best Feature Film by the festival’s jury.
Student Film Showcase
The next morning I returned to my now regular haunt, HOME, to see the festival’s student film showcase, a collection of 13 short animated films created by students from the likes of the UK, China, India, Estonia and Iceland. I really appreciated the chance to see these and the festival’s work to screen these films as it is so rare that student work of any kind makes it onto the big screen.
The standard, especially in terms of art and visual prowess, was astonishing. The opening film was a puppet animated film from the National School of Film and Television called Adios, following a man and his son in rural Spain dealing with the imminent departure of the son to England. The Puppets are stunningly expressive, with the rural backgrounds also being a wonder to behold, really conveying a sense of space where clearly there is none.
Many other forms of animation followed, Echoes directed by Robinson Drossos follows a boy exploring the underground of a city, rendered in striking black and white, hand sketched animation. We had On the 8th Day, which tells a story of environmental collapse all animated with fabric sewn worlds landscapes and animals which was a visual feast. Maybe above all in terms of visuals, I was immensely impressed by Polish short, Flame, a fairy-tale story animated using intricate wood burnings that must have taken ages to put together.
Other particular standouts from the showcase were Round Table Dilemna, an incredibly vibrant and colourful short from china telling a story about familial relations trough the dinner table and food. The Tube, entirely written, directed, and animated by Fangfan Han, a delightfully simple little short about, as you would expect from the title, London’s Underground. Another short i have to include would be the Icelandic Sheep Story, a bizarre and slightly unsettling film about a boy who lives inside a sheep that blends drawn and modelled animation styles to produce by far the strangest of the shorts.
While I felt the writing of many of the shorts left a little to be desired – those with no dialogue almost always fared better than those with – it was an incredibly impressive showcase of student creativity and art. The sort of thing that makes you feel bad you couldn’t even start to make something of that quality.
Sauvages
Once again, I returned to the cinema in the evening for a feature film screening. This time, it was for Sauvages, a French clay animation (claymation) film from Claud Barras (who people may know as director of My Life as a Courgette from 2016). Taking place in Borneo, Sauvages follows a girl named Kéria whose father works at a palm oil plantation and whose mother who was a member of in indigenous Penan people. When her father gives her a baby orangutan to look after, and her cousin Selaï comes to stay, a chain of events takes place that leads her into Borneo’s jungle and to meet her Penan family.
Firstly, I loved the claymation stylings. There’s an immensely tactile feeling to it, largely due to the decision to leave fingerprints and other marks on the character models that you can see in close up. It makes the whole thing feel very real and handmade in a way which only enhances the film’s aesthetic qualities. And it expands past just the humans, Barras creates lush jungles and animals in clay as well, which perhaps helps to explain the film’s seven year production time – but it was well worth the time.
While the visuals are the real star of the show here, the narrative itself is also well-done. The bickering sibling dynamic of the two child leads is very fun to watch, especially in the fish out of water scenario of someone plonked in the middle of the jungle. And watching Kéria find her place with her mothers family and grow increasingly conscious of the injustices that they face is very compelling.
As you might expect from a film based around the jungle of Borneo with the palm oil industry present, it has very strong ecological messaging. While animation is often home to environmentalist stories, it’s rare that they also take the time and attention to tell one about indigenous land rights, making this film a welcome and original intervention within the medium.
Admittedly, it sometimes tells it with very little subtlety and some narrative decisions feel a tad overly optimistic, but as a film that aims to be watched by all ages it feels unfair to mark it too harshly on that front. Sauvages is a lovely film that you should keep an eye out for when it gets a UK release.
The Glassworker
The final screening I attended on the final morning of the festival was for The Glassworker. Perhaps most impressively, the film is Pakistan’s first traditionally animated feature. A recorded intro showed some of the behind the scenes process which conveyed a real sense of passion behind the film, something that enhanced the experience in a way only watching at a festival can. It is also a directorial and studio debut for Usman Riaz and Mano Animation Studio respectively. Everything about the film’s production makes you want to like it – it feels like an underdog.
The film tells the story of Vincent Oliver, the titular glassworker, preparing for an exhibition of his work, with almost the entire story then taking place in flashback. We follow him as a young boy during wartime and his relationship with Alliz Amano, the daughter of the colonel in charge of the army occupation of their town.
The animation itself is gorgeous, the characters are all nicely rendered, but it really shines in the presentation of its settings: the vibrant colours of the market scenes makes you wish the film spent more time there; there’s an important recurring beach setting in the film, which is stunning; and the town the film is set in more widely feels lived in and completely mapped out by it’s designers.
It is worth bringing up now that the animation is very clearly inspired by the work of Studio Ghibli. If you are going to emulate any studio’s animation style I do not blame them for choosing Ghibli, and they carry it off well. The connections are not just limited to the animation style however, the story it tells is incredibly reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki’s work with the studio, the themes of how childhood and war and art all coalesce are as present here as they are across his work.
I am thinking specifically of The Wind Rises, which tells its story of art mingling with war in a very similar way to this film. There are worse influences to draw from and even a film doing the Ghibli thing not quite as well is still admirable, but it does leave the film in the shadow of that studio’s incredible output.
While the film was originally written and performed in Urdu, the version showing internationally is an English dub. It is unfortunate that the English voice acting is not particularly strong, lines are often delivered flatly with stresses not falling where they should to make the writing land with the heft it has the potential to. I can’t decide whether I love or hate the fact that the main character who has lived in Pakistan his whole life has a heavy Yorkshire accent, but it’s definitely distracting. No shade to the wonderful people of Yorkshire.
Despite some drawbacks, the film is an impressive feat and is undeniably important, with a strong domestic box office performance, as well as it being Pakistan’s entry for best international feature at the Oscars, hopefully spurring on the animation industry in its home country and that is really more important than how much it holds together as a film overall.
Even the weaker spots of the festival’s line-up were still worth seeing, the selections they made across the festival are great and representative of all facets of the medium. I honestly only wish I could have seen more, and have high hopes for the 2025 edition of the festival.
