This January, celebrate the eighth edition of Animation First, the biggest animation festival in the United States! This year's festival will run from Tuesday, January 21 through Sunday, January 26, and will present seven feature-length films and five short film programs, with a special focus on Swiss animation. Curators Delphine Selles-Alvarez and Chloe Dheu explain, "The 2025 edition of Animation First offers a bold mix of features, shorts, talks, and VR that range from family-friendly to experimental and off the charts. Playful, serious, engaging, and at times radical, the festival will transport audiences to places far and wide."
This year, the festival presents seven feature-length films (including three U.S, two New York, and one East Coast Premiere) and five short film programs. Fifteen guests from around the world join us for filmmaker talks, a first look presentation, and QandA discussions. Back by popular demand, Animation Speak/Easy joins us for the second year in a row, as does our juried competition of the new Francophone shorts programs. The festival will also feature virtual reality experiences, our annual Student Short Film Competition, and even an interactive make-your-own stop-motion experience for guests in the Tinker Lounge. We're also thrilled to have Swiss animator and director Georges Schwizgebel design our second-annual limited-edition Animation First series poster.
With films for adults, teens, and kids, the festival is crafted to engage and entertain guests of all ages throughout nearly a week of programming. Buy your festival pass today!
Schedule of Events:
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm: Virtual Reality
Throughout the festival, L'Alliance New York's Library will be free and open to the public for virtual reality experiences from French studios and distributors, including Ito Meikyu by Boris Labbe, Grand Prize winner at Venice Film Festival.
Ito Meikyu
by Boris Labbe, 2024, France, 20min
US Premiere
Ito Meikyu, which loosely translated means "wandering thread," is a virtual reality experience that develops around references from Japanese art history and literature (The Fukinuki Yatai, The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book) and unfolds as a large sensory fresco with strong emotional potential. A set of drawn, animated, and sound scenes together recreate a kind of subjective world in the form of a labyrinth. The virtual wandering space-composed of fractal architectures, and inhabited by plants, objects, animals, men, women, motifs and calligraphy-allows us to access different scenes based on the randomness of our choices. The result is a kind of hide-and-seek game with the user as the omniscient spectator.
7:00 pm: Savages
By Claude Barras, 2024, Switzerland, France and Belgium, 87min, DCP
Voiced by Benoit Poelvoorde, Laetitia Dosch, Michel Vuillermoz
In French with English subtitles
Following the success of his acclaimed 2016 animated film My Life as a Zucchini, Swiss director Claude Barras returns with an enchanting, humor-filled stop-motion ecological tale set on the Southeast Asian Island of Borneo. Collaborating with screenwriter Nancy Houston, the film centers on Keria, who takes in a baby orangutan named Oshi just before her cousin Selaï arrives to stay after escaping his family's ongoing conflict with local logging companies. Together, the trio must fight back against the planned destruction of their beloved ancestral forest. Brought to life by Barras' intricately crafted puppets, the story unfolds against the rich backdrops of the tropical trees, plants, and rivers of the island's rainforests.
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9:45 pm: The Best of Annecy 2024
The Annecy International Animation Film Festival is the world's largest animated film festival, gathering movie lovers from around the globe to experience the best of the artform, forecast trends, and meet filmmakers and creators. This curated selection of shorts highlights the greatest from the 2024 Festival, including a tailor-made opening sequence by students from GOBELINS Paris.
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