The State of Welsh Animation | CAF 2026 Recap
© Cardiff Animation Festival
I went into my first Cardiff Animation Festival with an embarrassing lack of knowledge on Welsh animation. Though familiar with legendary talents like Joanna Quinn, I was looking to the festival to give me a greater insight on the current crop of world class Welsh animators and for a heat check on where the state of the industry is. Through my three days in a sunny Cardiff, I discovered a homely, beloved section of the British Isles that so many wish could become animation royalty.
Chapter Arts Centre, where the majority of the festival takes place, was packed with Welsh animation talent. Together, we took in stories from the festival’s industry day about making it independently in the industry as well as what commissioners like S4C and the BBC were looking for. Through Cardiff Animation Night and Malt Adult Animation Night we celebrated bizarre and brilliant animation from across the globe. In the BFI shorts event, we took a peek into the kinds of films coming from British talent. And in the collection of Welsh shorts, local artists had their time to shine.
Chapter Arts Centre © Skwigly
One of those artists was Lewis Macaulay, a recent graduate from Arts University Bournemouth and director of Why Won’t Anyone Eat Me? Macaulay is a Cardiff native who has found a decent amount of work in Wales since graduating. “My first paid gig was with Boom Cymru, where I did some educational videos for children, and I did some independent networking with other animators in Wales and got another gig doing promotional videos for multiple rugby-related charities commissioned by Active Ops,” Macaulay told me. “Immediately, out of graduation, I had two decent gigs for animation in Wales that I couldn’t have done from outside of Wales, because I wouldn’t have had the same network. Still, I was kind of envious of friends in London who were getting internships at real studios or working in teams of people. I was just on my own in my bedroom.”
Hywel Prytherch Roberts is another Welsh native who initially left the country to work at Mackinnon & Saunders on their Postman Pat series before moving down to Bristol and contributing to Aardman’s Early Man. He reflects Macaulay’s thoughts on the isolation from animation in Wales. “I love Wales, and I go back as often as I can,” says Roberts. “A lot of the stories I’ve come up with are either based in Wales or based on my experience there. But I went to Bristol to study. I could have gone to Newport, there were quite good animation courses there, but Bristol had Aardman and I was very stop motion focused at that point. Where I’m from in north Wales, it’s quite isolated. There’s not much of an animation community there, so I felt like I needed to be somewhere where there was a community and a network and studios I could go work in. But through this festival and particularly with the film I made at the NFTS program, called “Bwgan,” I have connected with more of the Welsh animation community. I think ideally, I would love to just be able to live and work in Wales.”
“Bwgan” © Hywel Roberts
Nia Alavezos had something of an inverse journey to Macaulay and Roberts. Having grown up in the United States and worked at DreamWorks as a production coordinator on The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants, Alavezos found herself thriving more in Wales than she did in the American studio system. “I moved to Wales because my husband was Welsh,” Alavezos explains. “But one of the biggest things I learned after moving out here were opportunities within organisations like Ffilm Cymru Wales and the BFI Network, which is nonexistent in America. They don’t fund shorts, let alone features, to the scale they do here in Wales, so it was just wild to have these sorts of opportunities land on my doorstep. However, despite there being a plethora of studios here, the work that’s come out of Wales in the time I’ve been here have mostly been pre-school series or advertisements, so I can see why that might be isolating and disappointing to those looking for more work. Which is why I think the animation community cultivated at CAF is so fantastic.”
For as much as Macaulay has found work in Wales, he still has his heart set on leaving. His decision is based on money as much as it was on the type of work that he wanted to do, “Aside from Joanna Quinn’s studio, there’s a real lack of hand drawn work here, which is what I really want to do. Also, I’ve discovered that I’m quite bad at freelancing, all the business aspects like negotiating pay and tracking your hours. I would earn a lot more just working at a regular studio in Japan, which is notorious for not being the highest paid gig.”
The lack of a broad range of studios in Wales means a lot of artists are pushed into freelance work, something not everyone is suited for. Roberts mourns the golden era of Welsh animation, “I remember growing up and watching a lot of Welsh animation on S4C and being inspired by that. And then a lot of the funding opportunities for animation in the UK kind of disappeared.” Macaulay adds by drawing another comparison to Japan, “They have the opposite problem to Wales where there’s so much work and not enough people. Here, there’s so many talented people but not the work to sustain them.”
“Why Won’t Anyone Eat Me” © Lewis Macaulay
Contrarily, Alavezos has revelled in the freedom allowed by the funding structure in Wales, “At the time, working at studios like DreamWorks, I thought I was living the dream. But when you’re at a big studio like that, you’re confined to that role, and it was so hard to step out, for others to take you seriously. If you are in production, then you can’t be a director, you can’t write or do whatever you want. But over here in the UK, its all thanks to the indie scene and resources like Ffilm Cymru that allowed me the ability to experiment, even if I’ve never done it before. There’s a lot of ass kissing at big studios, that’s how a lot of people get to the top even if they’re not qualified. I often found myself asking, ‘How the heck did they get this role?’ When they did nothing but treat teams horribly, and get away with gross mismanagement. But of course it’s all because of privilege and connections, which was another huge eye opener.”
Having produced shorts like BAFTA-Longlisted Brain Space and BAFTA Cymru-nominated Spectre of the Bear, and even directed her own award winning short film, Passenger, Alavezos is looking to fund her first feature, Ghosts of Yesterday, but the process to get that money will be a bit trickier. “The budget for those shorts has always been between £15,000 to £25,000. So far for my feature, I’ve gotten £25,000 of development funds from Film Cymru, but overall, I’ll need around €5 million to €7 million to actually get it made. €10 million would be the dream. I’m hoping to do that through co-productions in France, perhaps even exploring options in Belgium, Luxembourg, and Japan. At most, we’d probably be able to get a million pounds raised here in the UK, but the rest will have to be sought elsewhere.”
“Passenger” © Nia Alavezos
So how can Wales retain its talent and produce more ambitious animation? “Having better places to platform films is really important,” says Macaulay. “You can waste a brilliant feature film by platforming it in the wrong place, and as a result, missing out on a lot of viewership, missing out on profit which could lead to more funding for more projects.”
“I guess funding is always great, right?” opines Roberts. “I think the festival has done a great job in bringing people together and it’s great that studios like Cloth Cat offer training opportunities for young animators. So more training opportunities, more funding, more places where people come together. People collaborate more when they’re working in the same environment. Many people work from home because they’re not near or they can’t afford a co-working space. So if there’s some kind of discounted co-working space in Cardiff, or even spread throughout Wales, that would be great.”
For Alavezos, having Wales produce a consistent amount of animated features is the goal, “My dream is for more features to come out of Wales that are competitive to films being produced in countries like France and Japan.” To do that, the arts need funding methods similar to what’s being achieved throughout Europe, not to mention utilising production levies and tax credits. “Wales has Ffilm Cymru and Creative Wales, but that’s still not enough to fund an animated feature. I’m a part of the Wales Animation Network, composed of various studios and freelancers, and we’ve been coming together to see how we can change this growing problem, in addition to building a more sustainable future for Welsh animation.”
Amongst other things, Brexit took away the opportunity for British talent to pitch their ideas at events like Cartoon Movie and Cartoon Forum. Alavezos laments the lack of a UK-based alternative, “The closest thing we have here would be pitching scripts or projects at various film festivals, hoping it would gain the attention needed to further it along the pipeline. It would be great if some of the other leading animation festivals in the UK, like Manchester Animation Festival or Cardiff Animation Festival, were able to have similar pitching events, competitions, or even residencies, to continue boosting talent and strengthening the industry here as a whole.”
In my first Welsh adventure, I discovered that for people in animation, having a network of likeminded people is just as important as the funding and the creativity, and the Cardiff Animation Festival does a great job of bringing people together. Its casual, friendly vibe, aided by some wonderful weather, allowed me to meet so many fascinating creatives with such high ambitions. The powers that be in the country aren’t quite matching the ambition of their people, but the specificity of Welsh culture and folklore deserves a place on the international animation stage. Here’s hoping that change comes soon and these artists get a chance to shine.