Ukrainian producers Anna Eliseeva, Igor Olesov and Irina Kostyuk – who have just left the car after driving the two-day drive between Kyiv and Cannes – kicked off this year’s Annecy Goes Day for the cartoon in Cannes with a call to arms.
“While Ukraine is fighting with Russia, we need to continue the fight at the cultural level,” said Olesov, whose project “Mavka, the song of the forest” (pictured) was one of five works in progress presented at the morning session on May 22. “Culture is our most powerful weapon at the moment, and we need to show our weapon to the whole world. This is why our team has double motivation.”
A family-friendly 3D adventure picked up from Ukrainian folklore, the feature-length project was selected to work on a Bordeaux cartoon in both 2017 and 2018 and has been in production since much earlier. Now with deals signed and delivered in September, the filmmaking team faces uncommon pressures on even the most complex of schedules.
“A lot of our animators work from shelters,” Kostyuk explained. They have been displaced and scattered all over the place. Some are in the occupied territories, facing Russian soldiers and tanks as they work to finish the film.”
While the project has already ensured distribution across a number of international territories, the film’s domestic future remains uncertain. “We don’t know when the local release will happen,” Eliseeva said. “We say it will happen after our victory – and that will be very cool.”
Of course, “Mavka, The Forest Song” was an odd thing for Annecy Goes to Cannes, a presentation in progress with Cannes Marché du Film and Annecy Intl. Animation Film Festival, where the other four titles are in early stages of development. While the Mafka team requested international support, the other four development projects were looking for international partners.
Directed by Zoltan Horvath, Jean-Jacques Kahn and Franck Van Leeuwen, and produced by Swiss company Nadasdy Films, the boxing drama “Closed Fist” tells the true story of Young Perez, a Tunisian Jewish immigrant who became the youngest world flyweight champion, and his older brother Kidd, who survived From the war and carrying his brother’s legacy. Heading into production, the project will use motion capture to give boxing bouts their punches while linking 2D computer animation, 3D graphics, and drawing in a visual style that’s supposed to look like a pattern.
“Lollipop” director Lisa Marie Russo called her visual test “serious Disney,” explaining that her semi-autobiographical story will deal with a woman’s battle with breast cancer with the iconic color, 2D graphics, and accessible character designs of some of the early ’90s films. . A non-fiction producer and past chair of the BFI Document Fund, Rousseau was also associated with the possibilities of fiction and one-on-one animation, especially when exploring a subject often not drawn in the shadows of documentary realism. She will produce Fly Films and Enter Yes.
Led by Naïa Productions and based on the bestselling trilogy of French graphic novels, “Epiphania” directed by Jan Kounen tells the story of a father and his son, following a human man and his adopted hybrid child across a sprawling science fiction landscape. Series creator Ludovic Debeurme has already set the tone with his dense and thoughtful appendix, and now Kounen is working with animation studio Mac Guff Ligne to translate Debeurme’s graphic novel designs into scalable 3D models. As he embarks on his first animation feature, Kounen will use the set of tools he’s accumulated over the past few years to direct immersive and virtual reality experiences.
Reminiscent of a ’90s indie comedy, When Adam Changes by Joel Vaudrell is a two-dimensional coming-of-age story about the horrors of puberty. Like the distant Quebec cousin of Mike Judge’s earliest work, Vaudreille addresses the embarrassment of adolescence by giving each character a unique shape and personality, no more than Adam himself, whose body includes all the sarcasm he receives. In the screened footage, the gritty teen hangs out with a potential crush, watches tacky game shows and suffers the awkward, awkward midsummer feel of being young and bored with little to do. Parce Que Films is produced by Parce Que Films.
Three weeks after Annecy goes to Cannes, the animator is going to Annecy for a huge festival – the MIFA Market Edition, which runs from June 13-18.
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