Every year since 2006, I’ve been highlighting the brief (one minute or so) animations made by small teams of graduating students from Gobelins, l’école de l’image (Gobelins School of Communications) in Paris to be used as introductions to each of the day’s events at the Annecy International Festival of Animation.
Like last year’s group, at least one of this year’s shorts uses GCI (and suffers rom the hyperkinetic restlessness seemingly inherent in that genre). But the rest are hand drawn and as is often the case with the Gobelins’ projects, continue to bolster my faith that new generations will carry on the traditions of hand drawn animation.
This year’s theme is Brazil, which some have interpreted in reference to the rain forest, others to carnival and others to life in Brazilian cities.
Unlike previous years, there are six shorts rather than five (I don’t know if Annecy added a day of events), and there are commercial credits at the end of the videos; presumably the school has gotten sponsors to help with the effort.
You can see the shorts on YouTube. (Note: images above are just screen caps from each of the five films, not clickable embeds. Please follow the provided link to view the films.)
