14 films to show at World Animation Festival, two Oscar-nominated

The World Animation Festival, organized by Cinematheque Passion, returns this summer with a selection of animations from around the world. Some 14 films will be screened for the festival, which begins on August 11 and will run until August 26.

Among the films to be screened is The Breadwinner, an Oscar-nominated film that tells the tale of an 11-year-old girl who must care for her family after her father’s arrest.

Another Oscar-nominated film to be screened at the World Animation Festival is Anomalisa by Charlie Kaufman, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. The film explores a central character crippled by the mundane reality of his life, who is reinvigorated after meeting a lively woman who seems distinctly different from other people. Anomalisa is the first animated film to win the Grand Jury Prize in Venice.

Meanwhile, A Town Called Panic is a comedy feature starring three plastic toys. Based on the Belgian cult TV series, the surreal adventure begins with an accidental order of 50 million bricks and leads to a trip to the center of the earth and into a parallel underwater universe.

In the Taiwanese animation On Happiness Road, audiences are taken through a journey of social change in Taiwan through the perspective of a young girl.

Among the two animations in the China Hit Series is Liu Jian’s Have a Nice Day. The film is described by the festival organizer as both “extremely ridiculous and unpredictable, featuring dark humor and a strong animation style […] rarely seen in Chinese animations.”

This year, the director-in-focus is Satoshi Kon. The festival will feature a retrospective of four of his works and delve into the world of his imagination.

Paprika, Satoshi Kon’s final feature film, shines a light on the blurred line between reality and fiction. In this sci-fi animation, a new revolutionary treatment has been developed to allow therapists to help patients by entering their dreams. When the devices which enable this begin to go missing, a renowned scientist has to delve deep into the dream world to discover who is behind the theft.