European Film Awards 2020: Four Animated Features Nominated

The pre-selection committee of the European Film Awards (EFAs) has announced the nominees in the animated feature category. The winner will be announced at the ceremony on December 12, which will be live-streamed from Berlin, Germany.

The nominees are:

• Calamity, A Childhood of Martha Jane Cannary — dir. Rémi Chayé (France/Denmark)
• Josep — dir. Aurelien Froment (France/Belgium/Spain)
• Klaus — dir. Sergio Pablos (Spain)
• The Nose or the Conspiracy of Mavericks — dir. Andrey Khrzhanovsky (Russia)

As in previous years, the list runs the gamut from high-profile award guzzlers to offbeat indie fare. The best-known film here is Klaus, which was produced at Pablos’s SPA Studios in Madrid and released last year as Netflix’s first original animated feature. It cleaned up at the Annies and was nominated for an Oscar, but that is no guarantee of success at the EFAs, which often pick smaller titles over big-studio productions.

The other three contenders have yet to be released Stateside. Calamity, which tells the story of Calamity Jane, won the top feature prize at Annecy this year; it was produced in the same style — and by much the same team — as Chayé’s last film Long Way North. Josep is another biopic, this time of the Catalan cartoonist and political activist Josep Bartoli. The film was one of four animated features in this year’s official Cannes line-up.

The Nose is the wild card here. This playful chronicle of Russia’s 20th century, from veteran animator Andrey Khrzhanovsky, received an honorable mention in the feature competition at Ottawa Int’l Animation Festival last month. It has the distinction of being the first-ever Russian nominee in this award’s 12-year history. Another note on representation: for the first time in four years, no female directors are nominated.

The EFA winner is voted on by the European Film Academy, which has over 3,800 members. Recent winners in the category include Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles (2019), Another Day of Life (2018), Loving Vincent (2017), My Life as a Courgette (2016), Song of the Sea (2015), and The Art of Happiness (2014).

The pre-selection committee consisted of EFA board member Béatrice Thiriet, director Anca Damian, producer Antonio Saura, and — representing Cartoon, the European Association of Animation Film — producers Diogo Carvalho and Camilla Deakin, and institutional representative Norbert Laporte.

Images at top, left to right: “Calamity, A Childhood of Martha Jane Cannary,” “Josep,” “Klaus,” “The Nose or the Conspiracy of Mavericks.”