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May-June ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 350).
A quick sampler of the wonderful animated shorts in competition at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival this year.
Les Bêtes (The Beasts)
Directed by Michael Granberry
Five years ago, animation veteran Michael Granberry realized he had dozens of very old stop-motion puppets that were abandoned and never used. “These weird, unique characters were rapidly decomposing, but instead of throwing them away, I decided to put them all in a movie together and see what would happen,” says the Emmy-winning director.
Believe it or not, Granberry’s project features about 246 distinct puppets ranging in size from 5/6th of an inch to 16 inches in height, made from foam, wire, latex, bakeable clays and other assorted materials. He recalls, “We had eight basic sets, which were all made from recycled and repurposed materials and designed very much like theater flats that could be reconfigured and moved quickly atop a 2’ x 4’ animation stage!”
Granberry, who has worked on wide variety of award-winning TV shows (Tumble Leaf, In the Know, The Tiny Chef Show, Severance) and movies (Wendell & Wild, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio) believes stop motion to be “some sort of alchemy through which ordinary materials can be transformed into mesmerizing visual storytelling, all through the physical efforts of an artist wrestling with their craft.” He adds, “It’s like watching a magic trick that, even though you know exactly how it’s done, still captivates you!”
So, why was Les Bêtes shot in black and white? “Since the characters were all originally built for other projects, the color palette was all over the map and, frankly, insane to look at,” explains Granberry. “I put a black-and-white filter over some early camera tests and the result reminded me of a 1930s Ladislas Starevich animation, which inspired the idea that this film could perhaps be a kind of tribute to his work.”
The director says he fell in love with stop-motion animation after watching Ray Harryhausen’s classic 1958 epic The 7th Voyage of Sinbad when he was only eight. “I was also inspired by such modern luminaries as Henry Selick, Phil Tippett, Will Vinton, Suzie Templeton, Max Winston, Robert Morgan and Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski of Clyde Henry Productions.”
Granberry says it feels wonderful to be part of the Annecy Festival this year. “Honestly, after years of working on larger studio projects, the thought of attending a legendary festival like Annecy with a zero-budget film born from little more than scrappy determination is quite humbling!” he says. “I’d love to leave the audience with this message: That kindness is always preferable to cruelty. And when we are confused about who ‘the beasts’ are, we should pause and examine how we are treating each other.”
Luna Rossa (Red Moon)
Directed by Olga and Priit Pärn
Estonian husband-and-wife team Olga and Priit Pärn are familiar figures in the global animation scene. The talented duo has been a festival favorite with acclaimed titles such as Divers in the Wind, Frank & Wendy and Life Without Gabriella Ferri. This year, their latest collaboration, Luna Rossa (Red Moon), offers a fascinating look at crime prevention in our modern era.
“We started out to make a film about crime prevention,” the directors tell Animation Magazine. “Suspicious individuals are tracked, and security cameras come into play … At some point, we wanted to show that both we and the viewers of the film are simply observers.”
The 32.5-minute short took about five years to complete. “We used motion capture, actors, 3D puppets, camera and set layouts to create the animation,” says Olga. “Then, Priit drew all the 2D-animation and layouts for animation in TVPaint. Finally, the film was composed in After Effects.”
“Working with motion capture was a bit of a challenge,” says Priit. “This technology was completely new to us, and it also included working with our fantastic actors. The real pleasure was working with the backgrounds and, as always, the sound of the film. The film premiered in southern Italy, where the city around us and the city on our screen seemed to be one and the same,” recalls Priit. “The Italians in the audience sang along to the songs sung by our characters on the screen.”
Olga adds, “When it was shown on the big screen at the opening of Fredrikstad Festival in Norway, the public walked out from the screening room dancing (just like the character in the short). We saw the powerful influence of Priit’s choreography on the public after the screening. It was unexpected and amazing!”
Priit says he likes to go to festivals like Annecy with low expectations. “Our work is done, and we have no way or desire to influence what happens next! I decided to work in animation about 49 years ago,” he says. “During that time, I’ve changed my mind many times, but I’ve continued. Do I still want to work in animation? I can’t answer that right now!”
Olga is more fatalistic. “My parents are animation directors,” she says. “When I saw them working, I thought I would never choose this profession. After I completed my graphic art studies, I still ended up as an animator. You can’t escape your destiny!”
“My principle is that I don’t moralize,” concludes Priit. “I don’t teach what’s right or wrong and how to live. I assume that my viewers are free to take away what they want. The main thing is that they don’t get bored!” Olga adds, “And I agree!”
Life with an Idiot
Directed by Theodore Ushev
More than 25 years ago, Oscar-winning director Theodore Ushev (Blind Vaysha, The Physics of Sorrow) read the book Life with an Idiot by Russian dissident author Victor Erofeyev. The story stayed with him as he prepared himself both technically and mentally to take it on.
“The absurdity of the narrative required immense skill and the right collaborators,” he notes. “In 2019, I met Emmanuel-Alain Raynal and Pierre Baussaron from Miyu. They took a leap of faith and agreed to produce the film — something for which I am deeply grateful. They secured the rights from Erofeyev, who, in the meantime, had faced trouble with Russian authorities and the Putin regime and emigrated to Germany.”
Ushev began drawing the film seven years ago, and the first draft of the script, which he co-wrote with his daughter Alexandra Ouchev, was completed in 2019. He used ink and aquarelle on paper to bring the project to life. “Additionally, I animated it using the free software Krita, developing my own ink and aquarelle tools in the process,” he adds. “I handled the animation, editing and coloring myself. Alexandra assisted with the text. The music and sound were crafted by the brilliant French composer and musician Yan Volsy. The voices were performed by Dominique Pinon and Lucy Page, who contributed as both a singer and composer.”
The director says the film tackles an absurd story embedded in themes of totalitarianism, violence and misogyny. “The challenge was to infuse it with sharp humor while maintaining good taste and avoiding vulgarity,” Ushev points out. “Additionally, the technique itself is highly labor-intensive, and working alone on every frame was no easy feat. On top of that, this was the smallest budget I have ever worked with.”
Annecy holds a special place in Ushev’s heart. “It’s a festival that has always been kind to me,” he says. “Over the years, I’ve received all the possible Cristals there, and it truly feels like home. Just two years ago, I had a major retrospective exhibition at the Musée du Château. Yet, each time feels like the first, and I’m eagerly anticipating my film’s premiere. It’s a rare and precious moment — the competition is so fierce that you never know if you’ll ever make it back!”
He adds, “After 20 years in animation, I’ve learned one thing — never worry about how an audience will receive a film. If people disagree with or even feel scandalized by Life With an Idiot, I will consider that a success. My goal is to spark discussion!”
Tapeworm Alexis & the Opera Diva
Directed by Thaïs Odermatt
Swiss director Thaïs Odermatt was fascinated by the life of opera singer Maria Callas. So, she decided to make an animated short about the acclaimed Greek soprano. “I learned that, at the beginning of her career, she was overweight and lost 30 kilograms within six months,” she tells us. “There’s actually an urban myth that she had a tapeworm ‘raging’ in her intestines to achieve the quick weight loss!”
Odermatt and her team of nine took about four years to finish the short using After Effects and Toon Boom. “This was my first animated film — as I’ve been a documentary and experimental filmmaker. I had to learn how the animators work. Everything was very precise and detailed. For me, working in animation was so exciting because you have complete freedom and there are no limits to creativity.”
The short’s visual style was inspired by the gossip magazines of the 1960s, the time when Callas often appeared in their pages. “Only the interior view of the stomach has a different visual language,” says Odermatt. “It has more depth of field and, as a result, it appears more three-dimensional. My big animation influence was Terry Gilliam.”
The director says she knew from the very beginning that this particular story had to be told in animation. “Images of an actual tapeworm in the stomach are pretty gruesome!” she explains. “No one would want to watch that for long! I just want people to marvel at and laugh about the crazy story of the tapeworm and the opera diva. And it would be nice if the tragedy also comes through a little.”
Atomik Tour
Directed by Bruno Collet
Five years ago, Bruno Collet’s short Memorable won the Cristal at Annecy and went on to be nominated for an Oscar. This year, the talented French director is back at the festival with Atomik Tour, a black-and-white stop-motion that centers on “dark tourism.” “I was inspired by Shahak Shapira’s work titled Yolocaust,” says the filmmaker. “By discovering the disrespectful behavior of tourists at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, Shapira made me realize how important it is for some people to visit places marked by tragedy in order to promote themselves on social networks. My short invites us to follow a young YouTuber to the radioactive city of Chernobyl. For him, the number of victims of the greatest nuclear disaster of all time is of little importance. All that matters is his image and the number of views that appear on his phone screen.”
It took Collet three months to make the sets and puppets, three months to shoot the film and three months for postproduction, including sound and special effects. “I really started working on Atomik Tour two years ago. As with my previous productions, once the script is written, I start shaping my characters. Once I’m satisfied with their design, I bring in the team who creates the molds, the prints and the puppet armatures. A team of about 60 people worked on the short — half of them were based in France (Vivement Lundi) and the other half were in the Czech Republic (Maur Film).”
One of the big challenges for Collet and his team was making the city of Chernobyl and re-creating the accident at the nuclear power plant. “Given my limited budget, I decided to shoot many scenes in front of a blue screen,” he explains. “This allowed me to use different scales for both the sets and the puppets. We had four different sizes for our 15 characters. Thanks to ‘multilayered’ filming, made possible by the use of motion control, a puppet such as the Liquidator (the person in charge of evacuating radioactive rubble from the power plant) could be replicated several times to form a group of workers.”
Commenting on the fast-changing world of animation, Collet notes, “When I started stop-motion at the end of the 1990s, the animation world predicted that this old technique would disappear with the advent of computer-generated images. Thirty years on, I can see that this is not the case. Look at the selection of animated feature films at this year’s Oscars. Out of five films, two were made in stop-motion. It seems that this old technique, with its craftsmanship and imperfections, still fascinates directors and audiences alike!”
Murmuration (Zwermen)
Directed by Janneke Swinkels and Tim Frijsinger
An elderly man in a nursing home suddenly begins to turn into a bird in Janneke Swinkels and Tim Frijsinger’s memorable stop-motion short. The initial ideas for the short were inspired by Janneke’s graduation film at Kask art school in Belgium, which was a documentary about her grandfather, filmed at his nursing home. “We really started writing a first draft of the script in 2019,” the filmmakers tell us. “We always worked on commissioned work with just the two of us and never made an animated short before, so getting the funding together for a 12-minute stop-motion film was pretty hard. That’s one of the reasons why it took us almost eight years to get the film made. We also had our little daughter Ida along the way, so that also made some things more complicated!”
The duo made all of the films’ puppets and props themselves and used Dragonframe at the Holy Motion Studio in Arnhem, Netherlands. “We always wanted to make a stop-motion film,” they say. “It’s really the feeling of the fabric and the craftmanship that drew us to it. The characters that you can literally feel in your hands. It’s playing with dolls, but it feels as if you can really make them breathe.”
Swinkels and Frijsinger say the most challenging part was to keep believing in their work and their talents. “We have seen/made every change in the edit and have seen the film tirelessly, [yet] we still see every little flaw or bit we really wanted to have done different,” says Swinkels. “We always were both a bit of animation nerds I guess, and most people we met in the animation Industry are really nice people. We just always wanted to be part of that.”
The directors are big fans of the works of stop-motion masters such as Marc James Roels, Emma De Swaef and Niki Lindroth von Bahr. “We also love the films of Michel Gondry, and maybe the work of Roy Andersson was a bit of an influence,” they say. “Most people can relate to the subject of our film to some degree, so we hope they will find a bit of comfort in it.”
Thank You, Dr. Farsi
Directed by Samaneh Shojaei
Iranian director Samaneh Shojaei’s new animated short Thank You, Dr. Farsi centers on a young girl who believes she has recovered after her therapy treatment, but the truth is that her situation has actually worsened.
“This isn’t necessarily a critique of therapists or treatment but rather an exploration of how deeply ingrained issues can resist easy solutions,” says the director. “This concept came about when my spouse [screenwriter Amin Kafashzadeh] and I observed a therapy group celebrating at a restaurant … Their upbeat positive conversation hinted at a deeper unhappiness, reigniting our fascination with psychological states. Our short explores the common experiences of social disconnection and internal disorientation. It also touches upon our tendency to judge others, perhaps as a way of deflecting from our own potential disconnect from our authentic selves.”
The initial work for the short began in the winter of 2021, and the film was completed in January 2025. “Preproduction took around two years, primarily due to financial limitations and resource acquisition,” says Shojaei. “A common concern for independent filmmakers is managing overlapping projects during production. I used TVPaint for animation, coloring and texturing. I then used Adobe Premiere for editing, After Effects for compositing and Photoshop for the background visuals. We had about 13 people on our crew.”
Shojaei says directing the short was the most challenging aspect of the project. “However, a major hurdle was the narration throughout the film,” she adds. “Ensuring it enhanced the rhythm without becoming distracting. The challenge lay in creating visuals that paralleled the narration without simply repeating it. I originally made the film in Persian, my native language, and only decided to switch to an English narrator at the very end. Rewriting the text for clarity and ease of pronunciation was the final challenge.”
The filmmaker says she’s very proud of how Iranian animation has been in the global spotlight over the past few years. “This year’s Oscars felt like a moment we’d been waiting for,” she says, reflecting on Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani’s Academy Award-winning short, In the Shadow of the Cypress. “It’s incredibly motivating for indie filmmakers like us. The strength of Iranian animation has always been its quality, particularly the compelling stories behind the visuals, and many Iranian animators have consistently been recognized at festivals.”
Bread Will Walk
Directed by Alex Boya
Five years in the making, Bread Will Walk is the latest in indie director Alex Boya’s long list of creative shorts. The project, which was also part of the Directors’ Fortnight selection at the Cannes Festival this year, was born from the filmmaker’s fascination with how nourishment can be reshaped into a mechanism of influence. He explains, “It challenges narrative conventions, turning bread into metaphor and appetite into a societal force. I wanted to reimagine affection and perseverance through a surreal perspective that resonates with both the present and the timeless.”
Produced by Jelena Popović and the National Film Board of Canada, the short also features the work of sound designer Olivier Calvert, composer Martin Floyd Cesar and actor Jay Baruchel as the sole voice performer. “The workflow remained tightly knit, hands-on and steadily refined across all stages,” adds Boya. “A special mention goes to technical directors Eloi Champagne and Mathieu Tremblay, whose creative collaboration was key to integrating my experimental processes into the pipeline.”
Boya says that the short’s aesthetic blends anatomical renderings with textures that feel unstable and alive. “The environment appears in constant transformation, giving a sense of decay and rebirth,” he notes. “The entire piece flows without cuts, preserving the illusion of a continuous shot. Influences include propaganda visuals, scientific diagrams and educational illustrations, all contributing to an atmosphere that feels absurd yet oddly convincing.”
When asked about his influences, Boya replies, “I take inspiration from animators who explore internal landscapes and psychological texture. Yamamura, Švankmajer and Pärn have deeply shaped my thinking. Martine Chartrand’s painted rhythms and Fritz Kahn’s surreal anatomy also inform my approach. My references stretch across disciplines, including scientific imaging, early documentary forms and the surrealist traditions of Eastern Europe.”
The director believes that his new offering speaks in a visual language unfamiliar to most viewers. “Some respond to its humor, others to its commentary on desire and control,” Boya says. “I take pride in how we preserved the integrity of handcrafted animation while expanding its range with cautiously applied technological enhancements. I hope audiences will recognize that hunger exists in many forms. Beyond physical needs, the film reflects on emotional, existential and societal appetites. If the viewing experience prompts reflection on personal and collective systems, or leaves a sense of thoughtful unease, then its purpose has been met!”
The Annecy International Animation Film Festival will be held in Annecy, France from June 8-14. See the full program and learn more at annecyfestival.com.
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