From September 6 to 11, 2022, the Fantoche international animated film festival presents around twenty new animated feature films with multiple awards, for all ages and all tastes. Your choice: a road movie around a Brazilian cult character; a gore-tinged unicorn movie; a Greek collage in black and white; five colorful animated adventures from Japan; four highly political stories; two feature films of which Switzerland is a co-producer – and finally, the announcement of a surprise: The 19th animated feature film of the 20th edition of Fantoche is unveiled! This is the mockumentary “Marcel The Shell with Shoes on” by Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer.
It’s a shell with a big eye and dressed in shoes that is announced in Baden: The American mockumentary “Marcel The Shell with Shoes on” is the long version of a three-minute YouTube clip, which appeared almost 12 years ago and having generated 33 million clicks, when in fact it had never been intended for the public.
At the end of a long process, here is a feature film which reaches a satisfaction rate of 98% according to Rotten Tomatoes. The animation of this moving story was supervised by Kirsten Lepore (as animation director) who has been Fantoche’s guest for many years with his short and feature films (Story from North America (2007), Bottle (2010) or Hi, Stranger (2016; revived in 2022 as part of the “Ivana’s Choice” program).
This year’s edition will open with “Forbidden to Dogs and Italians” by French director and documentary maker Alain Ughetto. This stop motion film – it is a Swiss co-production – is a tribute to the hundreds of thousands of people who left Italy – one of the protagonists is Luigi Ughetto, the director’s grandfather. The film won the Jury Prize as well as the Gan Foundation Award at this year’s Annecy Film Festival.
Highly political (family) stories Chinese director Lei Lei also starts from his own family history when he begins a dialogue with his father and grandfather on the Chinese cultural revolution in “Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish”. The interviews are edited in such a way that it feels like all three generations are sitting at the same table. In “Auroras Sunrise” too, the editing helps to tell part of contemporary history: Armenian director Inna Sahakyan evokes, with the help of archival images and animations, the dramatic story of the life of ‘Aurora Mardiganian and, at the same time, the genocide of Christian Armenians by the Turkish armed forces in the 1910s. Auction of Souls” had long been considered lost. In “Nayola” José Miguel Ribeiro tracks down the deep tears that the Angolan civil war left within the population. The objective of the film is not to look for culprits, but rather to wonder how to overcome the national trauma. He was particularly inspired by Angolan legends.
Some crazy proposals For film buffs and fans of the weird, let’s quote “Unicorn Wars” by Alberto Vázquez, who himself describes his film as a “psychedelic anti-war allegory” or a mixture of the Bible, “Bambi” and ”Apocalypse Now”. Or even Stephen King’s collage adaptation of “The Timekeeper of Eternity” (Aristotelis Maragkos) which, through its hypnotic and disturbing staging, looks more and more like a disturbing nightmare which places us directly in the subjective and distorted perspective of characters. And let’s mention “Bob Spit – We don’t like People” (Cesar Cabral). Bob Spit is the most popular character of Brazilian cartoonist Arnaldo “Angeli” Filho, whose comics, steeped in punk and counterculture, garnered wide attention in dictatorial Brazil and became part of the pop culture of the 1970s. At the Annecy Festival, Cabral won the Contrechamp Award 2021. On Friday, at Fantoche, he and his producer Ivan Mielo will offer an overview of this stop motion production during a “making-of” meeting.
For young audiences Four new feature films are specifically aimed at children: “Yuku et la fleur d’Himalaya” by Arnaud Demuynck and Rémi Durin – the second feature of the program which is co-produced by Switzerland – and a tender stop-motion story by Mascha Halberstad “Oink”, as well as “Princess Dragon” (by Anthony Roux, Jean-Jacques Denis) and “I am what I am”, a breathtakingly beautiful CG animation on the traditional lion dance , directed by Chinese Sun Haipeng. Six additional feature films are aimed (among others) at a teenage audience, including the musical adaptation of Robinson Crusoe “The Island” (Anca Damian), which tackles the novel’s colonialist vision, environmental pollution and the European treatment of refugees . But also the film adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary “Where is Anne Frank” (Ari Folman, “Waltz with Bashir”). The premiere of “Where Is Anne Frank” took place in Cannes in 2021. Fantoche presents the film in collaboration with the Yesh! Filmtage, which offer a comprehensive mediation program around the film.
Anime in the spotlight with five major productions This year again, five major Japanese productions will be screened at the festival: “The House of the Lost on the Cape” (Shinya Kawatsura), “The Girl from the Other Side” (Yutaro Kubo, Satomi Maiya) as well as “Summer Ghost”, a poignant drama about adolescence and the first movie of a famous illustrator, loundraw, as well as “Dozens of North”, the first feature film by a great animation specialist, Koji Yamamura (including “Mt. Head”), awarded at Annecy and at Animafest Zagreb. “The Deer King” is an epic film based on a series of novels, bringing together political intrigue and dark mythology through a visually spectacular universe.
Masashi Ando, who is making his first film here, is one of the great veterans of Japanese animation. As a character designer and animation director, he participated in some of the most important productions in the country, including “Paprika”, “Your Name” or “Princess Mononoke”. This last film dates from 1997 but, as a timeless masterpiece (and for its 20e anniversary), the Fantoche team presents it this year under the label of “Team Favourite”. Intoxicating images of the fierce struggle between humanity and nature, which seem more current than ever.
