A World of Dazzling Visions
The 2019 Annecy shorts offer a colorful variety of styles, subjects and methods from artists from around the globe.
The 2019 Annecy shorts offer a colorful variety of styles, subjects and methods from artists from around the globe.
If you needed more proof that brevity is the soul of wit, you need to check out some of the animated shorts selected to screen at the Annecy festival, which make us laugh, shake us up and speak volumes about the human condition in just a few minutes. We caught up with a few of the brilliant animators behind some of the 2019 shorts featured at the event to find out more about their inspirations, methodology and takes on the artform. Keep an eye on them as their projects continue to dazzle audiences both online and at festivals worldwide:
Tio Tomás
By Regina Pessoa (Canada, France, Portugal)
Director Regina Pessoa’s 2006 short Tragic Story with a Happy Ending won the top prize at Annecy in 2006. She’s back this year with another amazing project: Tio Tomás (Uncle Thomas), a short that was inspired by the memories of her own uncle. “I had a special affection for him, because it was with him that I started drawing on the walls of my grandmother’s house, where he lived,” Pessoa tells us. “He was considered a marginal person because he didn’t follow the standard norms of being a man— to raise a family, work, competition. But he was a good man who was kind and generous to his nieces/nephews.”
Pessoa says everything that happens in the short actually happened in real life.“He had experienced misfortunes and that had broken him, which accentuated his obsessive character,” she notes. “I always asked myself, ‘Why can’t my Uncle Thomas be celebrated as he is?’”
Tio Tomás was produced by Abi Feijó, with a budget of about 400,000 euros (about $449,000) in a 22-month period. The short is a co-pro between Ciclope Films (Portugal), NFB (Canada) and Les Armateurs (France), with the participation of exec producer Phil Davies (Peppa Pig). Pessoa used mixed media to create the animation.
“I wanted to keep developing my personal 2D animation style, but I also wanted to animate some scenes with real drawings on the walls and to make some stop motion as well,” she notes. “So, my ambition was to combine all these different techniques and visuals and create an aesthetic coherence between all these media. I used Photoshop for all the 2D animation and also for its integration with the stop-motion scenes.”
Pessoa says she will never forget the first time she saw Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush at a small theater in her small village in Portugal. “When he ate his own boots with such relish, I whispered to my sister, ‘It’s chocolate!’ It was my first film … what a great introduction to cinema!”
What does she hope audiences to take away from her short? “I once heard someone say, ‘We all have a half-crazy uncle.’ I think this is true and my film, although it talks about my unique and singular Uncle Thomas, I suppose a lot of people will recognize their own peculiar loved one. I wanted to show that it’s not necessary to do extraordinary things to be important in our life. That’s a motto I truly believe in.”