9 Animated Shorts You Won’t Want To Miss At Ottawa 2024

North America’s largest and longest-running animation film festival, the Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF), starts today in Ottawa, Canada, and as always, its short film selections are an eclectic and intriguing crop of films.

Sixty-nine short films are competing across seven categories, selected from a total of 2,308 entries representing 93 countries. Overall, 124 projects are in the official selection, including panorama shorts, feature films, and series.

Films such as Annecy grand prize winner Percebes (Alexandra Ramires and Laura Gonçalves) and Oscar-winning animator Torill Kove’s latest film Maybe Elephants are competing in the Narrative category, while Annecy’s Off-Limits prize winner Glass House (Boris Labbé) is presented in the Non-Narrative category.

But Ottawa also offers its own unique selections and there are always plenty of surprises in its competition line-up, as well as the films that end up as winnners. Remarkably, the last three editions of Ottawa have presented the grand prize for a short film to a Japanese production, starting with Honami Yano’s A Bite of Bone in 2021, followed by Atsushi Wada’s Bird in the Peninsula in 2022, and Ryo Orikasa’s Miserable Miracle last year.

Here’s our pick of nine shorts that reflect the richness and diversity of this year’s edition. Trailers have been included when available.

Confetti (Amanda Bonaiuto, United States, 2024)
Bonaiuto has built her career between commissioned animation and her own studio practice, filled with twisted characters, dark humor, and weird settings. She returns to Ottawa with Confetti after having received the festival’s best student film award in 2018 for her Calarts graduation film Hedge. A tale mixing separation, fever dreaming, and snails, Confetti makes its world premiere at OIAF in the Narrative category.

Freeride in C (Edmunds Jansons, Latvia, 2024)
The slopes of white tranquil mountains slowly get populated with red-and-blue winter enthusiasts in this catchy and rhythmic non-narrative film by Latvian filmmaker Edmunds Jansons. A former student of Latvian animation vet Priit Pärn, Jansons is an animation director and founder of Riga-based Atom Art studio, which has grown to be one of the busiest animation studios in the country. Jansons is also a guest tutor at French animation film school La Poudrière, and brings Freeride in C to OIAF for its world premiere.

Keep Out (Tan-Lui Chan, Hong Kong/Czech Republic, 2023)
Showcased at Animafest Zagreb earlier this year, Keep Out is the first student short by Hong Kong-based animator and illustrator Tan-Lui Chan, whose interest about European art and culture led to study animation at Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art in the Czech Republic. In her dystopian world where being approved by social media likes is a matter of life and death, a boy discovers that his ordeal might not be as hopeless as it seems. A cynical yet beautifully animated tale of our modern culture where content is a merciless king.

Moral Support (Vuk Jevremovic, Croatia, 2024)
Inspired by the eponymous song by Slovenian band Laibach, Moral Support depicts historical events from the beginning of last century with a harsh and brutally vivid style. Using all of Jevremovic skills, the film is a whirlwind of colored strokes fighting with blurry shades and ominous figures mirroring the sorrows of humanity’s bloody past. Showcased at Annecy in June, OIAF’s selection marks the beginning of the film’s North American career. It can be viewed in its entirety below:

Samaa (Ehsan Gharib, Canada, 2024)
Following up on his directorial debut (Deyzangeroo) in 2017, Gharib explores new variations of his approach combining photographic and animation techniques. In Samaa, a hand-painted bird fights to find freedom from his cage, questioning our very own perception of what it means to be free. Accompanied by a strong and visceral percussion soundtrack by artist and composer Ziya Tabassian, the film by this Canada-based filmmaker captivates with its striking visuals, creating life and animation alike from its at-first motionless colors.

Society of Clothes (Dahee Jeong, France/South Korea/Canada, 2024)

With her decade-spanning career, Jeong is a key figure in art-house Korean animation. The international recognition started with her debut film Man on the Chair (2014), which was featured in the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Cristal for best short at Annecy. Since then, she has received numerous awards for her films The Empty (2016) and Movements (2019) and comes to OIAF this year not only as a competing filmmaker, but as a member of the Feature Competition Jury. Society of Clothes, a touching metaphor of how clothing both defines and imprisons each human being, also marks a rare French-Korean-Canadian co-production between Miyu Productions, Between the Pictures, and the National Film Board of Canada.

Stampfer Dreams (Thomas Renoldner, Austria, 2024)
Austrian animation authority and self-taught artist Thomas Renoldner brings back Simon von Stampfer’s optical experiments from the 19th century on screen with Stampfer Dreams, both an homage to the scientist’s work and a wondrous experimental film. Von Stampfer, a pioneer in the research to achieve the depiction of moving pictures, premiered his Optical Magic Discs in Vienna in 1833, only a year after Joseph Plateau showcased his Phenakistoscope in Belgium. In a quiet and peaceful Austrian Alps setting, Stampfer’s animations bring life and movement to forgotten characters and crafts, before Renoldner’s mandalas and techno-like soundtrack transcends them into fascinating figures.

There Will Be No Other End (Piot Milczarek, Poland, 2024)
Milczarek’s There Will Be No Other End will make its international premiere in Ottawa this year, following up on his acclaimed debut film Deszcz (Rain) which was awarded the Special Jury Prize in Hiroshima four years ago, along with over 125 festival selections. Painting a picture of society in all its weirdness acoss five chapters, his new film is a beautiful white-and-blue short filled with cynical and humorous interconnected skits. Blue is definitely not the warmest color in this film where all it takes to counter a protest is a small pebble, and where a flying baby can captivate an audience.

you’ve got a friend in me (Peter Millard, United Kingdom, 2024)
Millard’s quippy film may not be to Disney’s utmost pleasure. To the tune – apparently sung by Millard himself – of Randy Newman’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” we are presented with a peaceful setting of white clouds on a blue sky. Only to be ripped from this sight a minute later to witness a childishly drawn Buzz Lightyear pummeling Woody to death before blowing his own head off. The two-minute short is as enjoyable and disturbing as it sounds, and brings back joyous memories of Marv Newland’s Bambi Meets Godzilla, though it might have taken a significantly larger amount of time for Millard to animate this effort than Newland’s iconic classic.