
Will Vinton – The Great Cognito (1982)
New year has come and the ongoing preparations for AniFest 2012 are getting more and more interesting, so here are some backstage news we wanted to share…first of all, the jury is now complete! And we are honoured to announce that short and feature films will be judged by Will Vinton (US), Igor Kovalyov (Ukraine), Michal Žabka (CZ), Špela Čadež (Slovenia) and Pedro Serrazina (Portugal). The jurors for animated commercials, music-videos, TV and students films are: Ülo Pikkov (Estonia), Sulafa Hijazi (Syria) and Andrew Kavanagh (Ireland). And we are more than pleased to announce also the honorary president of this year’s festival – this task was kindly accepted by famous writer, director and animator Barry Purves (UK). You can find more info about the jury in the About festival section.
And least but not last, when there’s new category, there’s also new jury – non-narrative and experimental films will be judged by Ivana Laučíková (SK), Martin Mazanec (CZ) and Martin Kaňuch (SK).
Year 2012 is a year of film puppet, because in February we will celebrate the centennary of one of the biggest puppet magicians Jiří Trnka. This year’s AniFest will thus bring for example a retrospective of Trnka’s films curated by Michaela Mertová from the National Film Archive, an exposition of scripts, puppets and sketches from the archives of Jiří Trnka descendants or a retrospective of Japanese director and Trnka’s pupil Kihachiro Kawamoto and another independent Japanese animator who is closely connected to Czech enviroment, Nobuhiro Aihara.
Puppets and puppet animation will be the focus of this year’s festival and we will look at the phenomenon of film puppet from every possible angle. Paul Wells is preparing a large retrospective of British stop-motion animation and some of the jurors will also talk about puppets in their programmes (Michal Žabka, Will Vinton, Špela Čadež as well as Barry Purves).
Our Baltic mission is coming to its end this year – juror’s presentation of Ülo Pikkov will thus accompany the retrospective of Estonian animation, the last one left after we’ve been to Lithuania in 2010 and in Latvia last year with Vladimír Leschiov.
Author of this year’s visual and director of the festival spot is designer, animator and a student at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts Matyáš Trnka – you can get acquainted with his work for example at the DVD „From Year Zero“ released by AniFest last year, where his short abstract film Absurp from 2009 was included. For the festival graphic materials, he uses an unusual technique of transluminated spirit paints and as a main component he chose the skeleton of a film puppet – the most important element, which however usually remains hidden to the viewer.