Annecy 2019: 16 Animated Features In Official Selection

The Annecy Int’l Animated Film Festival unveiled in Paris this evening the 16 feature films that will form this year’s official competition.

This year, there are only eight features competing for the Annecy feature film Cristal Award (compared to 10 last year), and another eight features as part of a new competitive category called Contrechamp, which is replacing the Out-of-Competition feature section. The Contrechamp section is aimed at presenting the “most unique feature films, as well as those that create more challenges vis-à-vis the audience.”

Asia is well represented, scooping up nearly half of the slots: four films from Japan, two from China, and one from South Korea. Latin America is repped by two films: Homeless from Chile and Día de muertos from Mexico, which is a national take on the Day of the Dead traditions already explored in American productions Coco and The Book of Life.

The United States didn’t get any features into competition, but one Canadian film — Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s Ville Neuve — made the cut. Most other entries are from Western Europe, with the exception of Marona’s Fantastic Tale from Romania and Away from Latvia.

The full list of selected films is below:

Feature Films In Official Selection – In Competition

• Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles by Salvador Simo – Spain, Netherlands
• The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily by Lorenzo Mattotti – France, Italy
• Marona’s Fantastic Tale by Anca Damian – Belgium, France, Romania
• Ride Your Wave by Masaaki Yuasa – Japan
• Checkered Ninja by Anders Matthesen, Thorbjørn Christoffersen – Denmark
• The Relative Worlds by Yuhei Sakuragi – Japan
• The Wonderland by Keiichi Hara – Japan
• White Snake by Amp Wong, Ji Zhao – China

Feature Films In the Contrechamp

• Away by Gints Zilbalodis – Latvia
• Children of the Sea by Ayumu Watanabe – Japan
• Day of the Dead by Carlos Gutiérrez – Mexico
• Homeless by José Ignacio Navarro Cox, Jorge Campusano, Santiago O’Ryan – Chile
• Kung Food by Haipeng Sun – China
• Underdog by Sung-yoon Oh, Chun-baek Lee – South Korea
• Ville Neuve by Félix Dufour-Laperrière – Canada
• Zero Impunity by Nicolas Blies, Stéphane Hueber-Blies, Denis Lambert – France, Luxembourg

(Pictured at top: “White Snake”)