The work-in-progress section of the Annecy Festival felt as diverse as ever in the 2025 edition, with a wealth of upcoming series and features across continents and mediums. The presentations of this unfinished work, broken down into their essential components, feels like something unique to animation for its continual process, and as ever, it’s one of the most fascinating parts. Here are some of the highlights of the week, with projects to look out for in the future:
The Mourning Children: Nagiko and the Girls Wearing Tsurubami Black
This preview session of the upcoming work by Sunao Katabuchi – best known for In This Corner of the World — was almost entirely about history. The writer and director spoke in captivating detail about the lengths which the crew went to in order to capture a period accurate and immersive recreation of Kyoto 1000 years ago, during the Heian period. It follows the life and writings of Sei Shōnagon, particularly the The Pillow Book, which detailed the goings-on of the court ladies whom Shōnagon served. Katabuchi had actually made Shōnagon a character in his films before, as a young girl who appears to children in the present day in Mai Mai Miracle. The director said that The Mourning Children came about from a curiosity about depicting Shōnagon’s life as an adult, at a time where disease was rampant.
The new studio Contrail, according to producer Manami Otsuka (who is also the CEO of MAPPA), was made so to facilitate extensive historical research, allowing Katabuchi to do a deep dive. The session itself could be described as a history of his historical research, too. Leading in to the discussion of the new film was a quick reflection on the detail of Katabuchi’s previous feature, In This Corner of The World, co-written with Uratani, his assistant director on The Mourning Children. The process of recreating Hiroshima as it was 80 years ago was meticulous, hoping to “capture the past, the reality at the time.” This went so far as to studying the cloud formations on important dates in the film, even jet streams. That dedication to truthful recreation, perceiving the world as it was, was also a key motivation on production for The Mourning Children.
Katabuchi’s production has already been quite open about its process – having shared both unfinished footage from the film and behind-the-scenes videos on Contrail studio’s YouTube channel. The work-in-progress session showed even more material: a making-of video showed off the costume work and consultancy, using real costume recreations to do movement studies for the heavy, extensively layered costuming that royalty would have been wearing around the time (they had to hire a traditional dancer because the team realized no one was able to move properly in 12 layers of heavy fabric). Though the session became so heavily focused on datapoints and archive dives and re-enactment, it was exciting nonetheless.
Viva Carmen
One of the most hotly anticipated panels of the festival was one about a new adaptation of a famous tragedy. Sébastien Laudenbach, known for co-directing Chicken For Linda! with his partner Chiara Malta, presented his new film Viva Carmen, adapted from Georges Bizet’s opera, Carmen. This time the solo director, Laudenbach spoke frequently about wanting to make this a feature which not only appealed to adults who know the material, but also modify the story to make it appeal to children, specifically ones aged eight and upwards.
Much of the session was dedicated to the film’s music. Laudenbach’s sister, Isabelle Laudenbach, helped compose the songs and score alongside Amine Bouhara, with input from the Carmen’s actress Camélia Jordana, a singer and composer herself. “I wanted the music to link to the street, but to also have this sense of destiny,” Laudenbach (the director) said, as he notes that the main characters of the film are poor and wanted more organic music to accompany their story. This film actually tells the story of Carmen from an altered perspective, as the street kid Salva has a prophetic vision about Carmen’s death, and tries to save her from that fate.
Visually, the film is characterized by touches which will be familiar for those who watched Chicken For Linda! upon its 2023 release. Laudenbach’s taste for simplified but elegant designs with expressive brushstrokes and use of color remains, though this time modified through collaborative effort from the designers. There was a (gentle) push-and-pull for the looks for each character, the early half of the session dedicated to finding a middle point between what all of the artists wanted.
Women Wearing Shoulder Pads
As well as proudly screening Mexico’s first stop-motion animated feature, I Am Frankelda, the Cinema Fantasma team also displayed their work on the upcoming Adult Swim series, Women Wearing Shoulder Pads. The panel featured Frankelda directors and Fantasma founders Roy and Arturo Ambriz, who also helped produce the show, as well as episode director and production designer Ana Coronilla.
Creator and director Gonzalo Cordova described the series as a spin on the Pedro Almodóvar films of the 1980s, paying loving homage to the director’s sense of style as well as the sometimes campy melodrama of his work. Cordova set the show in Ecuador, where he was born and where his family is from. Specifically, the show is set in Quito, in the midst of a story about a young girl trying to stop the practice of people eating guinea pigs, and a complex web of characters pulled into that fight. Nina wants people to stop eating guinea pigs and adopt them as pets, which presents some tension as her mother is a butcher. She gravitates towards the wealthy Marioneta, who is seemingly on the side of this cause. Also featured is Espada, who takes place in bullfighter-style events but against gigantic guinea pigs.
The absurdist comedy is entirely made up of women, as Cordova wanted to emulate the feeling of an Almodóvar piece where men are pushed into the background. But he also wanted to pay tribute to aspects of his mother, doing so by including designs which she created herself in her youth. (“I’m really glad my mom’s dresses got made — they’re tiny, but they’re made,” Cordova says). The show overall looks like a delight, one of the early clips showing off hints of loving pastiche of Almodóvar but comedy sensibilities which feel right at home on Adult Swim, like the director of an advert quietly and angrily promising herself to fire a little girl actress.
Daisy’s Life
The new film from the legendary Masaaki Yuasa represents another new beginning for the filmmaker: the first feature by his recently founded Ame Pippin studio. Co-produced with Miyu Productions, Daisy’s Life adapts the book by writer Banana Yoshimoto and illustrator Yoshitomo Nara, following the friendship of two young girls Daisy and Dahlia. Yuasa’s films have always felt fluid in their visual approach, but this new piece promises to be something else entirely in how the director claims that it will treat time itself fluidly.
The director was fascinated by the concept of eternalism, that all of time is happening at once, with simultaneous and parallel events all happening. He wanted to incorporate this idea into Daisy’s Life, which he aspires to be like a “tunnel book,” a sort of pop-up tome which expands into an almost cylindrical form with art that goes three-dimensional, but also flattens into a unified piece.
Beyond those heady ideas, character designer Izumi Murakami spoke frankly but enthusiastically about the challenges of adapting Nara’s illustration into designs for animation. She also took the time to speak about how she wants her character designs to represent something different for girls in anime — saying that the sexualization of underage girls has become normalized in anime, and that she that she wants to use her position on working on this film to work against this trend, a statement made to loud applause. Visual development artist Batiste Perron also spoke in a technical capacity, teasing the films complex layouts and approach to these relative perspectives of the world. A lot remains unknown about the film and how it’ll look in its finished form, but it seems that it will only take until 2026 to find out.
Heirloom
Though this reporter sadly was unable to make this session, press and animators alike were buzzing about Heirloom, the feature film debut of writer and director Upamanyu Bhattacharyya (known for the short film, Wade). Going off of materials kindly provided by the film’s producer, Heirloom is a “period fantasy family story” set in Ahmedabad — looking to give life to a city in a period of time which the director says is often overlooked. More specifically, Heirloom orbits the textiles industry, and uses this in its very storytelling — with the techniques of the film divided between traditional hand-drawn 2D animation, but also stop-motion animation using hand-stitched images, using embroidery to tell another story. Animation is still in progress and the team is looking for funding — but even from a distance, Heirloom is one of this year’s most fascinating and idiosyncratic work-in-progress projects.
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