Animation Festival 2020
Sunday 15th March
1.30pm
90 mins
Chester Animation Festival 2020
We are delighted once again to present the Chester Animation Festival. This is an international competition from both amateur and professional animators to showcase their work.
Launched in 2014, it has attracted hundreds of entries from all around the world, and has given talented animators the opportunity to present their creativity in all aspects of the genre, from traditional hand drawn work to the latest CGI generated films.
This year, we have received over 100 entries from 34 countries. The map below shows the distribution of entries.
We will present the final selection back to back in one showing. The audience will then decide who will win the Audience prize for 2020. Expect a few surprises!
| Farewell Rainy City T E Yates UK |
Animated music video faithfully following the route of the world’s first intercity passenger railway, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Also features John Greenwood’s bus, the UK’s first scheduled bus service. Draws inspiration from contemporary illustrations of the railway by T.T. Bury and H. West amongst various other influences. |
| Rain Piotr Milczarek Poland |
‘The Rain’ is a simple animated film on collective consciousness. It talks about how no accountability for our actions pushes us to thoughtlessly follow the crowd, which may lead to a tragedy. The film also depicts a struggle of an individual with collective hypnosis and its consequences for both the individual and the crowd. |
| Arthur and the Seagull Luca Di Cecca Italy |
The ninety-year-old Arturo is used to being alone and his days pass as a pensioner. One day a newspaper that advertises cameras comes into his hands. The seagull that he chose as a subject, however, seems to have a completely different idea about perfect photography. |
| Ladder to You Victoria Watson, Chris Watson UK |
Ladder to You is an octogenarian love story. Old Eric is tired of life without his dear wife, Elsie, but in his darkest moment she shows him that true love never dies. |
| Go! Go! Patradol Kitcharoen USA | Aaron the alligator, who lives his entire life in a tank in an animal theme park, is fascinated by the fireworks that are displayed in the park every night. He has a dream to see the fireworks up close. One day, he accidentally gets loose and makes his way into the park looking for the fireworks. It is up to Sue, the zoo keeper and Harvey the park mascot to get him back into his cage before he gets taken down by the animal control officer. |
| Spindrift Selina Wagner UK |
On a desolate island off the coast of Orkney, a young girl lives with her parents in a run-down croft by the sea. Her father has retreated far into himself and her mother can’t see past her own unhappiness, forcing the girl to survive on her own. She finds solace in the only other living thing on the island, a majestic sea eagle. With no human role models, her behaviour is distinctly bird-like; but when a boy arrives on the beach, she is forced to look at herself through his eyes and realises she wants nothing more than a human friend. |
| Candy Shop Patrick Smith USA | There are 11,926 pharmaceutical drugs available worldwide, this film shows 2863 of them. Pills and capsules are choreographed into a cacophony of shape, colour and size, resulting in a satirical commentary about our cultural, recreational, and economic dependency on pharmaceutical drugs. |
| Yeah Sure Schorsch Feierfeil Austria | Official animated music video for Austrian musician Marco Kleebauer. “A figure lies in bed. Rigid and motionless. Her eyes are open and yet she is sleeping. Lucid dreams serve the musician Marco Kleebauer as a source of inspiration for his current album. For “Yeah Sure” I have designed an animation video that slowly overgrows the real image of another music video by Kleebauer to immediately detach from it and slip into an absurd, dark-comical deep-sea dream world …” |
| Don’t Croak Daun Kim USA | An agile long-legged frog escapes from being dissected by a frenzied determined 12 years old girl. |
| Circuit Delia Hess Switzerland |
On a small planet, caught up in their own little private universe, the inhabitants perform their poetically surreal actions, which repeat themselves in an endless loop. That they are all part of a complex little ecosystem which can only function if each of them plays his or her role, is something they are unaware of. |
| Bluebeard Alexander Gilfillan South Africa | Bluebeard is a 3D animated short film. The animation takes place within a story book and adopts a paper aesthetic. The story is an adaptation of the fairy tale by Charles Perrault. The film was completed as part of an honours in digital art at the University of the Witwatersrand. |
| Babamimoun Speakman Sound Eidy Knowles UK |
This music video for the band Speakman Sound, tells the story of an alien traveller from an advanced race who travels to the surface of a desolate planet, reawakens it and initiates a cycle that ends in the creation of life from death. It has a strong environmental theme featuring an hourglass counting down time to an unknown catastrophic event. Throughout the whole film the contrasting colours blue and yellow are used to represent the two conflicting forces of man and nature and the fight to find a balance between them, personified by the yellow and blue grains in the hourglass falling. |