Animated Encounters 2012 – The Award-Winners
Today this year’s Encounters Festival draws to a close following a lively and packed after-party at Bristol’s Watershed cinema, the primary venue for the festival’s live-action offerings. This in turn came on the heels of their awards ceremony, which saw a lot of deserving filmmakers duly accoladed for their hard work and creativity. Beginning strong with a personal favourite getting a nod, Tim Reckart’s “Head Over Heels” was granted the nomination for the next Cartoon d’Or. Moving on to the awards themselves, both of this year’s DepicT! winners were animated offerings; Scott Coello’s “Hey” (Shooting People Audience Award) and Mole Hill’s “The Fat Cat” (DepicT! Award), with two more animations “Big Signal” (Evelien Lohbeck) and “Living With Depression” (Anna Ginsburg) receiving special mentions.
The Best of South West animation category winner was “Klovesteinen” (Anders Furevik), a Norwegian folk tale whose visual execution refreshingly employs the type of traditional character animation that rarely gets its due.
Best of British went to Ainslee Henderson’s charming and well-crafted case study of self-doubt and social anxiety “I Am Tom Moody”, with Joni Männistö’s superbly creepy “Kuhina (Swarming)” deservedly winning for New European Talent
The live-action side of Encounters certainly received its share of attention, with “Cutting Loose” (Finlay Pretsell and Adrian McDowall’s)’s win for Best Documentary being one of the evening’s touching highlights when the film’s main subject and his mother were brought onstage. Other live-action winners included Anke Blonde’s “Dura Lex” (European New Talent), Matthew Knott’s “On This Island” (Best of British) and Gunhild Enger’s “Prematur” which earned itself the Brief Encounters Grand Prix.
The Animated Grand Prix itself took no risks, with the success of Emma de Swaef and Mark James’s “Oh Willy…” being more or less predetermined. As well as being a fine display of stop-motion craftsmanship, the originality of the main protagonist’s journey puts it in the incredibly rare position of being a lengthier animated short that actually improves with repeat viewings.
Congrats to all!