Animation has had a prominent identity within the New Zealand International Film Festival for decades, showcasing boundless creativity from around the globe. This year, Animation Now! graduates to becoming its own festival with seven unique screenings of short, animated goodness: Opening Screening, Black & White, Asia Animation Review, Handmade Animation, Dark Hearts, Indie LA, and Sixty Six.
If there’s only one person happier about this expansion than me, it’s longtime NZIFF animation programmer Malcolm Turner. After the appetite-whetting screening at the festival’s programme launch, I got to chat to Malcolm in the Academy Cinemas boutique theatre about how gosh darn amazing it must feel to finally get an animation festival running on its own two legs.
“When I started doing this, we were getting 300 films coming in a year on VHS tapes in the mail,” Turner recalls. “You fast forward to now and you’re talking just south of 4500 films coming in. I’m the guy who has to wade through those 4500 films, and in many ways, I’m the most disappointed guy because I know what didn’t screen.”
“In the 20 years that I’ve been doing this, the proliferation of animation festivals all around the world has just been one of the phenomena that’s helped improve people’s understanding of what animation can do. It’s forced animators to raise their game because they’re getting many more opportunities to put their work in front of a reasonably critical audience.”
Velodrool, playing as part of the Opening Screening programme
“There are now animation festivals in every country I can think of, and the fact that we were doing good animation programming in NZIFF was probably getting to the point where it was stopping a standalone animation festival coming out. And we recognised that.”
“This is the year that we’ve decided to do it. There are 100 different ways that you could launch a standalone animation festival. NZIFF is all about presenting challenging and thoughtful cinema to an audience that needs exposure to this, and this standalone animation festival that we’ve launched just taps into that.”
“Next year we’ll be bringing in historical New Zealand programs. The year after that we’re going to be bringing in historical anime programs – that kind of material. So we’ve broadened the scope of contemporary animation right now. That’s a good start.”
Fish, playing as part of the Black & White Showcase programme
So what made 2016 THE year to kick this standalone festival off? I threw this question to Malcolm: “We’ve been talking about it for probably five years, but we started talking about it seriously two years ago. The issues aren’t about how much or how little great animation is out there – if it was just that we could have done it anytime. The issues are boring things like ticketing systems and venue space. New Zealand is critically short of really sympathetic cinema venue spaces to do this kind of thing.”
“The issues are about building relationships with the international distributors that we would really want to have on board. One of the films that we just watched, Blind Vaysha by Theodore Yusaf… we must have those kinds of films in there. That film comes from the National Film Board of Canada, and you don’t just ring those guys up and ask them to send something. It’s a lot more complicated than that.”
Blind Vaysha, playing as part of the Dark Hearts programme
“I’ve been watching that film being made for the last couple of years. It was completed last year and I was actually able to secure it on the spot. If I hadn’t been there in person, I don’t think we would have been able to have that in show. And not having a film like that in the program undermines your claim to having a great animation festival. You’ve got to have that kind of material. You must do.”
“It takes a year to put yourself in the position where you can get that, and then it takes another year for that stuff to come in. I saw Blind Vaysha in September last year. I’d known about its production for six to eight months before that, so it had been on my radar. I happened to be there, I was able to secure it then and we’re showing it now, almost 12 months later. You’re talking about a two year period.”
Business Hours, playing as part of the Indie LA programme
“One of the things that I love about working for NZIFF is this uncompromising approach to making sure that what we do is what we believe is the best – which is not to say that other people will necessarily agree with that. But the festival director, Bill Gosden was like, “If we’re going to do this it can’t be token. If we’re going to do this, we’ve got to get the best films that we can get, and we’ve got to get them from the best places,” and they’re places like the National Film Board and The Royal College of Arts in London. And that timeline that I’ve just described to you is very typical of what it takes to get these sorts of films and to get them here.”
Visit the NZIFF Animation Now! section for full screening details and more info on each programme
