Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
The latest incarnation of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival wrapped up today, with the French-set animation fest handing out the standard passel of awards to its films in competition. Top prize this year, for instance, went to Arco, the debut feature from French director (and well-loved comics creator) Ugo Bienvenu. Carrying a stamp of approval from Natalie Portman, who produced the movie, the film is about a rainbow-hued kid from the far future who finds himself trapped in the relatively more near future of 2075 after a flight goes wrong. There’s only a few seconds of footage from the film available online at the moment, but it’s distinctive, eye-catching, and now award-winning stuff. (Arco has already been snapped up by Neon for a U.S. release.)
Elsewhere at the festival, the Jury Prize went to Japanese mermaid feature ChaO, about an office worker in a futuristic world who suddenly gets proposed to by a mermaid. (Who, in the trailers circulating online, looks a lot less like a traditional mermaid, and more like a big walking fish.) Directed by Yasuhiro Aoki, the film has been grabbed by Gkids for North American distribution. And if that all sounds too silly and wholesome, don’t worry: The festival’s functional third prize winner, Dandelion’s Odyssey, promises some existential horror mixed in with its whimsy: The film, directed by Momoko Seto, follows four dandelions as they try to find a safe place to land after a nuclear war. (The trailer for the film shows butterflies burning while flying through the sky in the aftermath of the blast, so that’s a new one for Our Big Mental Reel Of Fucked Up Things We Hadn’t Seen Before.)
Other winners at the festival, which ran from June 8 to June 14, included Olivia And The Invisible Earthquake, directed by Iborra Rizo, Little Amélie Or The Character Of Rain from Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han, Endless Cookie from Canadian filmmakers Pete and Seth Schriver, Kim Bo-Sol’s The Square, and a number of short films and animation made for TV. (You can see the full list of winners here.)
[via Deadline]
