Looking Back on ANIMA 2026
© Anima Festival
On the border between February and March, I arrived in a Brussels caressed by an intoxicating mix of rare, warm sunbeams and the typical sweet scent of speculoos crepes. Viewed from above, the city would have been peppered with specks of blue, with the poster for this year’s Anima festival, gorgeously designed by Émilie Tronche, finding a home on billboards and shop windows across town.
In addition to the giddy buzz which any festival-hosting city is imbued with once enough animation nerds gather in one place and brush shoulders with people who are only celebrities in these specific rooms, the locals going about their lives seemed to be in particularly high spirits too. As the sun showed its face on this part of the world for the first time in 2026, the town square fries dispensary was as busy during the day as the outdoor seating areas of bars and bistros were in the evening.
All that energy was most densely concentrated at Flagey, an almost 100 year old radio station converted into an all-purpose event space, and the home of the majority of Anima’s festivities. My first moments inside Flagey were a sensorial banquet. Flanking the entrance are the welcome desk and merch stand, which sported eye-catching art books for films like Arco and Little Amelie. Before I had time to process the eye candy in front of me, my nose was awash with the scents emanating from the crepe station and cafe area, and my eyes were drawn to the myriad of people filtering into the screening room just up ahead. You never forget the first time you visit a film festival, and Anima makes a wonderful first impression.
The Flagey © Skwigly
While indulging in the buffet of features, shorts and panels that I went to see, I was struck by the diversity of audience in each showing. In a panel titled ‘Interrupting the Gameplay’ about the art of the video game cut scene, an expected crowd of curious students and industry professionals filled up the room, but for a screening of the Brazilian feature Papaya, a raucous crowd of young families occupied every seat in the house. For a festival that holds such industry focused events as works-in-progress and pitching sessions, Anima has a firm grasp on the regular person who may not go to the movies more than a handful of times a year.
On the final day of Anima, I spoke to the festival’s co-director Nicolas Moins about tailoring to multiple audiences, “We have the films in competition which we choose from the ones that are submitted, but we also have Futuramima, the side of the festival that’s more focused on professionals. We try to link that programme to the films we have at the festival. For example, if we’re showing Arco, it would be a great idea to have a panel about the making of Arco. Naturally, those audiences combine. It’s like how we did the queer reading of The Iron Giant this year, we attracted a lot of people who aren’t interested in animation, but are questioning their queer identity. It’s important for us to show that art can bring people together.”
The strategy has worked for Anima with the festival seeing a 10% rise in ticket sales from last year to this. Moins couldn’t pin down an exact reason for that healthy bump, “Maybe it’s because in Belgium, people are not going to the cinema much, maybe they are waiting for the festival. This is a place where you can, in 10 days, watch a lot of things through a curated selection that we made. I think people trust us after all these years, that when they come to the festival, they will discover something that they love.
“What I found really interesting were the screenings of Angel’s Egg and Memory Hotel, one from the past and one quite niche, but had a big interest from the public. People who are not professionals or in the sector of animation still wanted to discover these films. Also, there are films like Arco or Little Amelie which have already been in cinemas here, but it could be that people are waiting to see them during Anima.”
Each year, the Anima festival chooses a country to focus on, and in 2026, Irish animation took the spotlight. Moins recalls the decision to go with Ireland this year, “During this year, animation in Ireland has exploded. We all know Cartoon Saloon, but there are a lot of new animators that are really great, as we saw in the Oscar shortlist and nominees. I met with Maurice Galway, the festival director of Animation Dingle, and we asked him if he could make a programme of animation around Ireland.”
An interesting dichotomy popped up in my three-day stay during the comprehensive 10-day festival. In back to back days, I attended panels that had very different viewpoints on AI. First was “Slop, Skill and Degenerative AI: A Manifesto For the Untalented”, a lecture by VFX artist Pieter Van Houte. Those tuned in with the widespread dangers of AI may not have learned much new information from Van Houte’s lecture, but it was a nonetheless necessary and scathing takedown of the technology and the people enforcing its use on us. There were bound to be people in that audience that needed to hear this, and Van Houte struck a perfect tone that lay between anger and intellect – a direct and energising call to arms for artists.
Contrarily, Saturday saw a masterclass from animation studio Temple Caché, hosted by co-founder Kelzang. The two and a half hour talk focused mainly on Temple Caché’s philosophy as a studio, which focused on “organic” creativity and a confluence of myriad abstract concepts which didn’t read as very concrete and a bit Silicon Valley until we got to the breakdown of a music video they brought to life, for Snoop Dogg’s “Last Dance With Mary Jane.”
The technique behind the video was undoubtedly impressive, so much human labour went into its incredibly smooth transitions, psychedelic feel and the various animation styles on display. Kelzang also did a great job of breaking the video down on a technical level. However, he was keen to stress that “only a little” AI was used in the video, mainly to save time on texturing. It was an odd experience to hear this casually thrown out with Van Houte’s lecture still ringing in my ears, but is representative of the fractured nature of the debate on AI. So many artists vehemently oppose it, but so many studios continue to invest.
If it’s the job of a festival to display the industry in microcosm, then Anima definitely achieved that, making time to display the joyful side of the industry too. In the humungous Studio 4, a room in Flagey most regularly used for symphonies and orchestra practice, I sat down for a collection of short films with a deeply giving and engaged audience. The burst of appreciation for each film’s unique style and tone and the ability of the audience to immediately click into what each film demanded of them was an astounding display of synergy. One short in particular, the creepy and existential God Is Shy, brought the house down as the credits rolled, and I really felt like I was amongst my people.
I left Brussels full of fries, Neuhaus chocolates in hand and parsed through the details of my many passing and meaningful conversations with fellow animation heads. Anima has what every festival that isn’t Annecy needs – the feeling that you’re entering a community. I look forward to next year where I will once again indulge with Belgian films, people and crepes once more.