As the Annecy International Animation Film Festival returns for its 66th year, its Work in Progress strand offers a rare glimpse into the artistic process behind contemporary animation.
The Annecy International Animation Film Festival feels as though it’s about the process as much as it is the exhibition of animation. Now in its 66th year, the festival taking place in the French alpine city has changed and grown substantially across the last couple of decades, even just in the last few years, as many of the biggest animation studios and distributors from Hollywood have begun to take centre stage in the Bonlieu Scène Nationale, the main venue. Yet, even as the festival has become a home for splashy announcements and slate presentations, there remains a space carved out for seeing strange and idiosyncratic animation like in the “WTF” shorts screenings and other presentations of boundary-pushing short films. Another venue, called the Salle Pierre Lamy (about a 10 minute walk from the Bonlieu), houses one of my favourite strands: the festival’s Work in Progress sessions.
Each is an hour and 15 minutes long, with the directors and creative leads talking through the making of their production, often broken down into pre-production (including look development and storyboarding, animatics), production (animation!) and post production (compositing, etc), depending on how far along the project is. This is, after all, a festival which has its eyes on education of its large demographic of students and industry hopefuls as much as it does exhibition and sales, so even the most minute details are sure to be included.
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It’s probably one of the most exciting things about Annecy, perhaps more so than the idyllic lakeside views, that its exhibition of animated film sits side by side with the ability to see these works broken down into their components in its Work in Progress strand, and both are greeted with equal fervour. In 2023, for example, Nickelodeon screened Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem while it was still being finished, as they recognised that the crowd would appreciate it anyway. It’s not often that you can find the aesthetic appeal of a feature which is still being made – it’s something which feels exclusive to animation and therefore unique to Annecy in getting to experience this at scale.
Panel breakdowns about the making of a film are, of course, not unusual. SXSW (London edition included) houses a number of panels alongside concerts, films, TV and more. What makes Annecy feel different is that, for many attendees, these events are often the main draw, even for films that don’t have the built-in audience of an established franchise. Or, in the case of something like Mutant Mayhem, there’s a sense of the programme flowing between finished and works and works-in-progress. You’ll also find the odd Making Of session in the Bonlieu. Shows which fans pray avoid cancellation or publications treat as obscurities are star attractions here – what other festival would have character designers and animation directors treated like rockstars? (Genndy Tartakovsky, for example, is practically the festival’s patron saint).
This year, Indian director S.S. Rajamouli opened a presentation of a Work in Progress session for an animated Baahubali film, a session full of raucous applause – equal to the reception of Common Side Effects, which also showed a breakdown of its upcoming season. These sit alongside works: from the subversive Ogresse, which plays on jazz, Haitian culture challenges animation’s history of racist imagery, to Igi, a painterly feature which also happens to be the first animated feature from Georgia. I recall first glimpses of films by Sebastien Laudenbach, particularly his recent adaptation of Carmen, which was introduced in the work-in-progress strand alongside a barebones live performance of music from the film. Most show their projects from initial drawings and progress gradually until a complete clip or a trailer is shown – often a single scene which has been taken apart throughout the hour as a working example, as was the case with Common Side Effects, which showed the same scene in both rough and completed versions.
I’ve been covering the Work in Progress strand for a few years now, and what it really illustrates about the medium is how much more conducive it is to being broken down into individual components and remaining aesthetically appealing. It’s always fun to see character studies and turnarounds, to appreciate background paintings and early concepts, rough animation and to understand the philosophy guiding these distinct practices, as well as the principles that unite them. Animators and animation fans are thinking about these components now more than ever, and many sessions made this clear through denouncements of generative AI. It’s a tiresome subject, but an inescapable, unavoidable one at this particular festival as it continues to encroach upon the medium. Artists were often quick to declare that no AI would be used in their work or ever at their studios, and each time, they were met with the loudest possible approval.
If, as Monica Castillo from AV Club suggests in an excellent essay, the medium of stop motion is the antithesis to generative AI (a sentiment which I have had shared with me by a few stop motion artists, including the Ambriz brothers of Mexico’s Cinema Fantasma themselves), the Work In Progress programme at Annecy feels like the same notion applied across programming. With generative AI “the result is only an approximation of what the prompter asks for,” Castillo says, “not what they dream up for months, draft, and redevelop”. These drafts and redevelopments are the exhibition of the Work In Progress strand; it’s the granular detail of the human work of animation laid bare for an audience, who get to see the guidance of all the moving pieces and how exactly the artist’s hand guides the look. If there’s excitement to be found in seeing a literal human thumbprint on a clay model, then this is that feeling for an hour at a time, seeing how each department contributes and how each artist directly informs every component of animation – whether hand-drawn, computer animated or built and puppeteered.
It should be pointed out that there are contradictions within the festival itself when it comes to any kind of stance on AI. In previous years, the programme has featured AI “films,” and discussions around trying to make it work in the industry. Jamie Lang of Cartoon Brew, in a wrap-up piece of this year’s festival, highlighted the heavy presence of AI companies as well as conflicting views over generative AI, most dramatically shown in the crowd reaction to Undone director Hisko Hulsing’s new project Danse Macabre, which used programmes trained on his own paintings. Hulsing mentioned in an interview with Cartoon Brew that these sequences all had a final pass from the art team. The reception at the première was decidedly hostile – Hulsing responded in kind.
Even with the festival seemingly leaning towards compromise with regards to AI, what has remained uncompromised as of yet is its character – delightful rituals are kept alive by young animators and animation enthusiasts, like the throwing of paper planes at the stage of every single screening or panel, screaming “lapin!” when a rabbit appears in the pre-roll/festival trailers, even making other animal noises and ‘pop’ sounds when the house lights dim.
To me, part of that spirit is the excitement about the individual pieces that go into animation of all kinds. Zooming out, it’s wrapped up in the rather simple appeal of Annecy – a place where animation and the specific artistic practices which make it are not treated as a niche. It’s treated with reverence, as a multifaceted artform composed of different, sometimes overlapping mediums, rather than just something to be simply bundled with family films. There’s also the saturation of the festival with those working in the industry: students, recent graduates, artists looking to network make up the bulk of the crowd. It creates a delightful common language – something which I don’t experience often in the international animation scene (animé often gets this treatment through conventions and such), let alone at this scale. The Work In Progress sessions strip back the studio pageantry which has drawn greater crowds to the festival, to something a little more essential: recognition of what it takes to build an animated feature, recognition that it doesn’t just happen, and better still finding delight in seeing how that work happens.
