Though Annecy Festival has become rather large scale and increasingly star-studded in recent years — take this year’s Wes Anderson masterclass or The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim presentation — its most engaging strand is the more intimate Works in Progress sessions hosted at the Salle Pierre Lamy, a stone’s throw away from the festival’s center at the Bonlieu. It’s hard to make it to everything as there’s a session one after another every day, beginning to end, but what we caught was fascinating. Here are some of our highlights.
Hyakuemu
The follow-up project to director Kenji Iwaisawa’s beloved anime On Gaku: Our Sound, Hyakuemu is shaping up to be a fascinating meeting between that previous film’s DIY indie routes and more conventional commercial production. Funnily enough, it was the On-Gaku artists on stage who described this production as being bigger and more commercial, while their new collaborators such as Keisuke Kojima (Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End) described it as being more indie for them. It’s somewhere in the middle.
Based on the manga of the same name by Uoto, the story focuses on two characters, Togashi and Komiya — two childhood friends and rivals passionate about the 100 meter sprint. Togashi is a naturally gifted runner, while Koyami catches up to him over the years through constant refinement of technique. Producer Akane Taketsugu from Asmik Ace says the project first started 15 years ago when a producer first took interest in adapting the material via rotoscoping, before she took over — she describes it as a story of “failure and renewal.”
A story of natural gifts colliding with gradual refinement over time feels like at-home material for Iwaisawa, considering how On-Gaku follows a group of boys starting a band despite no innate talent for playing music — circumstances that felt in sync with its “miniscule production team,” “operating out of someone’s apartment,” Iwaisawa saying, “it felt like I was making a short film, though it took seven years to complete it.” Hyakuemu, perhaps also like its subjects, feels like that instinct meeting with a larger and perhaps more refined type of production, and the session showed some interesting ways in how they met.
The film’s art director Keikankun Yamaguchi — a student in oil paints and fine arts — also worked in the same role in On-Gaku, and it seems like Hyakuemu still has her adapting on the fly. She said that she wanted to do as much of it analog as possible, “I’m not against the current trend, but I wanted to find my own style,” she elaborated. That spirit of exploration lead to some rather unique results for Yamaguchi, who noted that her lack of experience in backgrounds lead to her trying different things — at one time painting 29 different backgrounds for a shot lasting just three seconds.
Hyakuemu is currently in production, with the live-action shoot now finished, and the film due for a 2025 release.
The Upside Down River
A practically minded and rather educational session opened the week with the work in progress panel for The Upside Down River. The event may have been by-the-book, so to speak, but the series itself — eight 20-minute episodes adapting the novels by Jean-Claude Mourlevat, felt rather unique. A co-production between Dandelooo, Vivi Film and Sparkle Animation, The Upside Down River follows Hannah and Tomek, as the former seeks to cure her pet bird and the latter simply to sate his wanderlust. The series particularly scrutinized Tomek’s motivations, as they needed something “more complex than following the pretty girl,” and so complicated it by adding in a search for his long-lost mother.
The production went from initially being two 90-minute installments to a more episodic structure, and the team spoke about some of the benefits and difficulties of TV work (“less money per minute,” but also more scope for narrative, in short). Design supervisor Héléna Loudjani of Dandelooo’s Ooolala studio spoke through look development, Sleeping Beauty was cited as inspiration especially for the forest scenes, Loudjani pointing out the shared strong and dark vertical lines. Continuing into displays of the animation elaborated on the look, with 3D characters styled to look 2D, a process balanced across the collaborating studios. The series looks to be a pleasant children’s fantasy, and is currently looking for buyers, TV and international distributors.
Planets
Though it’s hard to tell how much was learned about what the final shape of the film would look like, the mad details of the Planets session made it one of the most entertaining sessions of the week. Director Momoko Seto was joined by her collaborators from Miyu Productions — Franck Malmin (director of post-production), Tanguy Olivier (director of production) and composer Nicholas Becker — to talk through the feature’s wild process. Planets is a rather allegorical concept, “themed around displacement and migration,” the two dandelion seeds “putting down new roots” as it follows two dandelion seeds on a trip through the cosmos, hoping to find somewhere new to settle.
To capture the feeling of an alien planet, Seto decided to simply look closer at the flora, fauna and textures of our own planet. An example of one of the many planets conceived was made through close ups of salt crystallization, others observations of mold or bugs filmed in macro to make them look “like Godzilla.” They also did it through the strangest plants that the team could find, and if they couldn’t find it, they simply cultivated it themselves. Seto described growing their own plants and filming them with live-action time-lapse photography, later going to Japan to find different ones. There’s even a frog (“We had a lot of problems with her agent,” Seto quips), one of many oddities amidst the terabytes of footage shot over 256 days since 2021 (“three days more than Apocalypse Now!” Seto gleefully notes). The photography is intended to combine with 3D animation as well as stop motion, and Tanguy discussed building a VFX pipeline which was a little different for Miyu, who have primarily dealt with 2D. How it’ll all work together remains to be seen, but for now, it was an extraordinarily charming event.
Housenka
From Baku Kinoshita, the director of the critically acclaimed anime series Odd Taxi, comes Housenka, an original feature film that might have been the most promising of the works-in-progress at this year’s Annecy. The story concerns Akutsu, an aging yakuza serving a life sentence in prison, reflecting on his past in conversations with the eponymous housenka (“touch-me-not”) flower that he’s grown in his solitary cell. That may sound rather somber and down to earth, but there’s a small fantastical twist in that the flower appears to talk back. Kinoshita and art director Ayumi Sato spoke often throughout the panel about their appreciation for anime made before the industry-wide switch over to digital production, and though the film Housenka is also produced digitally, much of it is made to emulate more of an analog feeling, avoiding the uniformity of filters and looking for contrast instead.
The session was hosted by Kinoshita, Sato, concept artist Michinoku Toge and CEO of studio CLAP Ryuchiro Matsuo, who explained that the film was in the middle of being drawn while the voices were already recorded, with the animation being done to fit the dialog, in the tradition of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. Unlike that film however, Kinoshita’s is rather quiet and downtempo, the director aiming for something more serene. “My last anime was an ensemble piece, this time I wanted something a little more stripped down, with more detailed drawings,” laying out Housenka’s mission plainly. Kinoshita handled the initial story idea as well as the character designs before handing off the scriptwriting to Kazuya Konomoto, his writer on Odd Taxi. In his descriptions of the work, Kinoshita was funny but also engaging, as he carried on to break down his design work, starting with a charming flow chart that showed the characters progressing from neat, simple shapes to fleshed out people with asymmetrical details indicating something about their personality — a lopsided fringe here, a scar there. As well as character design Kinoshita handled a lot of the storyboards himself. drawing them in as much detail as possible so to preserve his intent: deliberate rhythms of stillness, movement, stillness again.
Since the flashbacks take place in the ’80s, Kinoshita and Toge started with what they called a nostalgic approach with lighted, faded colors but decided that they wanted to show the period through the characters’ eyes, make it feel current through a more vivid, deeper palette. As well as referring back to ’80s anime, they considered how the spaces were shaped by the character’s mindset, explaining Akutsu’s minimalist taste changing the usual clutter of domestic spaces. That expanded to the sound design, which focused in on natural sounds and ambience instead of a constant musical score. That quiet and introspective atmosphere is what makes Housenka so exciting, especially with it being an original story — those two elements immediately making it stand out from the crowd of anime features.
Kambole Campbell is a freelance writer and critic based in London, whose work has appeared in Empire Magazine, Sight & Sound, The Independent, The Guardian and Polygon.
