originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/759821...

Hey friends, welcome back to Animation Night! Hope you all enjoyed Scavengers Reign as much as I did! My life has gotten pretty nuts in the last week, so our writeup today will have to be a little sparse, but I do have some exciting goodies~

The device on top is an external blu-ray/DVD player which I can plug into my ordinateur! Underneath it are some DVDs, containing the award winners from the Annecy festival in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

For those of you who were around in 2021, you might have seen some of these shorts, because that year the Annecy festival was online for pandemic reasons. In 2022 I couldn’t go to the festival, so the contents of that disc are rather mysterious, but 2023 I was there in person and it was a blast! (I will hopefully soon have a chance to migrate all those posts onto my other site for easier navigation!)

I’m excited to have this BD/DVD player at last, because it will mean that we’ll be able to access a lot more material that is not available online for whatever reason. These shorts are a great example of that kind of thing - sometimes, such films do make their way online eventually (e.g. on the NFB website if they were made in Canada), but often after making their tour of the festival circuit, those short films will disappear into some dusty archive, never to be seen again outside of weird little niche DVDs like this one.

So, what’s the plan tonight? Well, this week and next, we’ll pop on Twitch and have a crack at these DVDs. If I can find higher-res versions of the shorts I might show those instead. Along with that, I’ve found some rather good student films from this year’s CalArts cohort, so we’ll check out some of those as well.

All in all I have 29 films! Some funny, some dramatic, some abstract, but all full of The Vibes. I’ll make a proper list later - but for now, anticipate a pretty varied grab bag of films from across all the categories of Annecy! These include some personal favourites like Hold Me Tight by Mélanie Robert-Tourneur, La Saison Pourpre by Clémence Bouchereau, and Drijf by Levi Stoops, which all happen to be about naked people. But not all the films in these DVDs are about naked people! That’s either a reassurance or a warning depending on how much you like seeing naked people.

Animation Night is planned to begin at 21:30 UK time at twitch.tv/canmom, assuming no unexpected disruption. Drop in for some, drop in for all, either way I’ll be glad to have you!

(Todo: fill in the 2021 films here.)

Animation Night has taken some blows, but it will not die if I don’t let it! And as such, we’re back tonight, with a fresh batch of films that won awards at the Annecy film festival - as well as the best short films I can strain from the information superhighway~

These include (linking full films where available online, and otherwise trailers)…

• Amok by Balazs Turai, which won the Cristal for short films!

• Anxious Body by Yoriko Mizushiri, which won the the “Jury Mention for superbly executed animation and formidable physical experience”, if I’m reading the French right!

• Intersect by Dirk Koy, which won the Off-Limits prize!

• Maman, il a quoi le chien? by Lola Lefèvre, which won the Jury Mention for a graduation film.

• Persona by Sujin Moon which won the Cristal for a student film.

• Steakhouse by Spela Cadez, which won the Jury Prize.

• The Invention of Less by Noah Erni, which won the Youtube Prize.

• The Record by Jonathan Laskar, which won the Jean-Luc Xiberras prize for a first film.

Along with that we have many of the latest student films! We got horny furries (not like that… well it’s complicated)! We got questionable adverts for tank games! We got the latest Punch Punch Forever! We got cold war spy lesbians! We got vibesy old CGI! And much more besides! Well, some more besides!

Animation Night will go back to full length films sometime soon, but right now she is recharging, so I hope you will join me for another night of the short, emotional, stylish and freaky. Will anything rise to meet last time’s majestic dark elf sex? Tune in to twitch.tv/canmom to find out!