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Reuniting cats in a narrow flat

Q. What do you do if your two cats keep fighting?
A. You separate them, and then gradually re-introduce them.

That sounds great, but how exactly do you gradually do something that, in practice, happens in one moment? Well, we figured that out, but it took 2 years. So just in case this helps anyone else solve a similar problem more quickly, I thought I’d write it up!

You can find the key steps to re-introducing cats if you ask Jackson Galaxy or read this book, but depending on the cats and the situation, you may need to figure out some additional stages. In particular, in a narrow flat like ours, the primary corridor is a cat-territorial flashpoint that is hard to avoid. This is the story of how we eventually succeeded.

Step 1: Adopt cats that are friends

We knew we wanted two cats, and that cats aren’t always friendly to each other, so we waited until a chance came to adopt two cats that had already lived together.

Maple in particular started out very cautious, hiding inside the sofa-bed. We eventually won her trust with treats:

They soon gained confidence, and here they are sharing a duvet, Fern (black/tuxedo) and Maple (torbie):

Step 2: Cats stop being friends

Despite being declared neutered when taken in for adoption, a few weeks later Maple started yowling and crawling about in a sort of commando crouch – pretty clearly a cat in heat. So we took both cats to the vet to be checked and neutered, and they returned with neat shaved squares of fur and an incision to heal:

Poor Fern turned out to have already been neutered, but it seemed prudent to check, and this was the only way to be sure

Right after this, the two cats started scrapping, which apparently is something that can happen if one (or both) spend some time at the vet and possibly pick up some new scents. With wounds that needed healing, we had to put a stop to this pretty quick.

One odd part about this: it would always be Maple chasing after Fern. However, we noticed that when other cats came into our garden, Maple would run indoors to hide, whereas Fern would run out to chase the intruder cat off. To be honest, this isn’t very important to the story of how they became reunited, but we did find it pretty fascinating:

Step 3: Separate the cats

Our bedroom is at one end of the flat, and access to the small garden at the other. Dividing the flat in half gives one cat snuggling privileges and the other roaming privileges, so to balance this out and prevent territory-forming, we would swap them over every 24 hours.

Here we see Fern demonstrating an intense desire for Outside while swapped

The cat antagonism was pretty intense. If Maple caught sight of Fern, she would chase her down and a huge fight would break out. So just swapping the cats meant closing one in a side room, bringing the other through and closing them in a different side room, then ushering the first cat through to their new half of the flat. This was the starting point for the reintroduction.

Step 4: Feeding nearby but out of sight

As all the experts advise, we switched to making sure cats only got fed at breakfast and dinner, and fed them either side of the door that divided the flat.

Then after a few days of that, we did the same with the door jammed open a crack.

The outside still calls to Fern

The cats would sometimes sniff at one another through the crack, and then Maple would reach a paw through to … bop Fern on the head gently? It was kind of unclear but looked semi-friendly. However, if we eased up on the multi-stage swapping routine and allowed the cats to encounter one another, chasing and fighting would resume right away, so we needed to find a gradual step somewhere between ‘door is ajar’ and ‘door is open’.

Step 5: The gate and the markers

Again as the experts advise, you create that step by installing some sort of baby-gate, and you drape a towel over it. The cats can hear and smell one another better than through a door-crack, but still can’t see each other.

Obviously you also have to discourage any gate-hopping

We marked out lines on the floor with masking tape and over a few weeks fed the cats ever-closer towards the gate. If we tried to get too close too quickly Fern would veto the whole thing, so we had to progress slowly.

We then raised the towel a little, and repeated the process. Then raised the towel further and went through it again. Eventually the cats were happy to eat very close to one another with only the bars of the gate separating them.

Step 6: Backwards and forwards

With that step cleared… any time the cats had direct access to one another it would, eventually, still lead to a chase and a fight. We would step back to the gate feed at some distance again, or if Fern became reluctant to get that close to Maple, we would put the bowls back to a further position, and then slowly move forward again from there.

Fern no longer sure about eating this close to Maple; so, move back a step.
After building back up to it, Fern is happy even having her back turned this close!

All the experts talk about this: if you have a setback, you just move back one step, and then work from there. But we stalled around this stage for a long time; even from the above stage, having direct access to each other would still quickly devolve to chasing. We needed another graduated step between gate feeding and being fully combined.

Step 7: Eating together

For at least the first 30 seconds of feeding, we noticed Fern is absolutely laser-focused on food to the exclusion of all else. We decided to use that. In the very moment the food was about to be put down, we would open the gate, and then put the food bowls close to one another.

The cats just got straight to eating with no trouble. But as soon as Fern finished, she would quite decisively saunter off away from Maple.

Step 8: Being ready for food together

The moment before eating was easiest to extend. We started to open the gate while we were preparing the cat food. If the cats got at all close to one another without incident while this was happening, we would give them each a cat treat. (Apparently cats respond to positive feedback, but not negative feedback!)

There would be the occasional hiss or raising of paws, but nothing like the chasing and fighting we had before, because they were both focused on the incoming food. As we did this for longer, the positive moments (like sniffing one another nose to nose) increased, and the hissing/bopping decreased.

Step 9: Coexisting after food

The next direction to extend was after feeding time ended. One problem: Fern would tend to leave about half of her food, whereas in the same amount of time Maple would finish hers. When Fern then left, Maple would immediately move in to try to polish off Fern’s leftovers.

There’s a fix for that: we got Fern a microchip feeder, which would only open up when it detected her microchip.

(There was a whole gradual process of getting her used to that too of course! Eating from a new bowl; a new bowl near the feeder; a new bowl in the feeder uncovered; partially covered and retracting when Fern was near, then incrementally more covered until Fern understood she could go right up to it in the closed state and it would open up for her).

Maple seemed a little jealous of Fern’s new feeder

With that in place, we could allow the cats to mingle for a little while after dinner as well. Meanwhile we would continue to reward any friendly interactions – which now occasionally included licking/grooming each other’s cheek/head, although that would still sometimes fall back to a raised paw stand-off.

Step 10: Reunite… with guests!

So this step was kind of unorthodox and may be hard to replicate, but we had some family visit for a few days. This is a pretty big distraction for the cats, who have to navigate some rearranged furniture and new humans, so we took the step of reuniting them full time. This actually seemed to work – there were no cat fights, they just tried to stay out of everyone’s way, often taking refuge in our bedroom at the same time.

Step 11: Stay united

After the visitors left, we removed the baby gate and let the cats roam as they wished. While the cats generally kept a distance from one another, there were no fights. We continue to reward friendly encounters, and hissing/bopping still happens occasionally but the gaps between these small incidents get ever longer.

It’s not perfect, and they’re not as close as they seemed right at the start – but it works, and still seems to be improving. Most importantly, there are more and more moments when they seem, once again, relaxed in each others’ presence.

Relaxing in the garden
Playing ‘spider tennis’, where you take it in turns to bop the spider and have it run towards the other cat
Two years on from that first photo – together on a duvet once again

Looking back, it seems incredible that this took two years. There were many forwards-backwards steps along the way, but the hardest parts were always when we needed to work out a new gradual step. If we knew then what we know now, we could perhaps have moved through the whole process in 6 months.

For any of you out there facing a similar challenge, good luck!

  • Tim Mannveille tweets as @metatim and has a lot more cat pictures if you’re interested

Tenet: First viewing notes

I watched Tent in the UK on Saturday 29th August.

With people are still being cautious as lockdown eases, I imagine most screenings were, like mine, barely full. The film is also yet to be released in the US. A weird result of this is that online discussion of the film is still at a very early stage, and simply Googling for some explanations yields a long list of clickbait articles from mainstream publications that give basic plot summaries and even get certain details wrong!

[SPOILER WARNING: I’M GOING TO WRITE ABOUT MOST OF THE FILM, DON’T READ ANY OF THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT YET!]

Edit: Obviously time has passed and people have collectively figured a lot of stuff out! I recommend starting with the FAQ on the Tenet Reddit. Meanwhile, I’ll leave this post up as a kind of time capsule.

One useful resource is this more detailed summary of the film, which serves as a useful recap and explains some details you may have missed.

In the absence of good discussion, I thought I should just lay out what I’ve been able to figure out myself and the questions I still have at this point. It certainly seems like Christopher Nolan is the kind of guy to plan all this stuff out carefully, so there probably is some sense to be made here!

Plot details that were weird on a first viewing

In the initial Opera scene, The Protagonist (John David Washington) is saved by someone firing inverted rounds, who has some sort of distinctive orange tag. This turns out to be Neil (Robert Pattinson). It seems very open quite where or when he came from, or what he was doing. Presumably acting under later-timeline-Protagonists orders, or possibly even trying to acquire The 9th Piece of the Algorithm in the first place? I’m not sure how to figure it out, but it also doesn’t really matter.

There’s a whole bit about what the protagonist was really trying to do and why did it go wrong, made harder to understand by the (apparently deliberate) muffled mixing of the dialogue. It seems like they are working in concert with some Ukrainian special forces to extract a compromised double-agent and what they believe to be some plutonium. However, some of the Ukrainian forces have gone ‘rogue’; this is why we see one of them helping the terrorists, and why we some of them kidnap the protagonist and torture him. Presumably this was also part of Sator’s gambit to obtain this 9th piece of the algorithm, but I’m not quite clear on that.

When the protagonist meets Neil, it’s a bit odd – he knows he drinks diet coke! He brushes it off but we know something is up. It turns out Neil has been interacting with a future-version of the protagonist all along. It’s not clear if Neil has travelled back a long way for this mission, or if later on the protagonist gravels back a long way to recruit Neil, but I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s a bit more odd that presumably Neil is briefed on how to interact: “Don’t tell me anything about Tenet or who you really are, but feel free to drop weird hints that might make me distrust you initially”.

The car chase has something odd going on, and it turns out this is because a key part of it isn’t shown to us when we go through it ‘forwards’. What we missed was the protagonist taking the 9th Piece out of the case, then seeing himself in the silver car – and presumably out of intuition, he throws the piece into that car.

Not understanding what has happened, when the protagonist goes on to invert, he gets into the silver car, not realising that the 9th Piece is in it. he rejoins the car chase, and the piece ‘throws itself’ out the window back into his original self’s hands. Only then does he realise how it all works.

I don’t particularly understand how Sator was then able to figure out where the 9th piece ended up, but given he was doing a temporal pincer movement, it’s easy to imagine he could have figured it out.

The palindromic interrogation scene is kind of deliciously mad – Sator, moving backwards in time, is trying to get information out of the protagonist, who is moving forwards in time. Again, I could barely catch the dialogue, as it’s broadcast over a reversing-radio and the audio is hard to make out. The only way to really make sense of this is I think to carefully read through the script forwards and back, but right now I just assume it makes some kind of sense.

There’s some complicated stuff to do with injuries. While inverted and travelling back to Oslo, the protagonist has pain in his arm, which gradually becomes worse, then a bleeding wound; this all then leads up to the point when he is fighting with himself, and gets stabbed in the arm with a lock pick. So, while travelling backwards, healing goes backwards – okay. How does this then work with how they are able to keep Kat alive after she gets shot? I don’t follow that yet.

Edit 1: A thought experiment: you build a clock and set it to midnight. You wait for 1 hour, then enter an inverter with the clock, and come out going backwards. You wait for one hour (going backwards in time), looking through the glass and seeing yourself manufacturing the clock (it looks like you are dismantling it). What time does the inverted clock show now? Midnight, or 2pm? I’m not actually sure, and you really need to know that to think through the injury logic!

In the final battle, there’s some complicated stuff with Neil. The protagonist needs to get through a gate; on the other side he sees the dead body of someone with a blue arm-band and that orange ‘tag’. That person then gets un-shot… and turns out to be Neil, who understood how this all worked and travelled back there to make sure the door got opened, even though he knew he would die. The only part I don’t understand here is the mechanics of opening the door for the protagonist… if he’s travelling backwards, does that mean he did it by closing the door?!

Biology/Chemistry/Physics

There are some questions about exactly what does and doesn’t work when you’re inverted. It’s shown that you can’t breathe normal air – they say something like ‘the lung’s valves don’t work’? That seems odd though, what about your heart’s valves? I would presume the action of breathing increases entropy; if you try to do it with non-inverted air, I guess that’s a contradiction in chemistry/entropy, so that’s fair enough. Heart valves are fine because your blood is also inverted!

It’s not shown in the film, but what does this mean for eating, and to recall Red Dwarf’s take on the genre, excreting?! I presume you can only digest inverted food, but probably excreting is fine as everything inside of you is also inverted?! I can understand why they wouldn’t show this, although I did wonder about how they had enough food and air to survive going backwards in time for multiple days. Perhaps they have a small inverting ‘pump’ that can convert air and liquid food?!

Still, this doesn’t seem quite consistent with the injury problem – if you are inverted, the entropy of your body is now going backwards too. That means wounds should heal, not develop. I guess unless they were caused by something going the other direction in time? I definitely need to think that through more carefully…

Finally, one of the interesting ideas in arrow-of-time discussion is that the reason we perceive time as moving in the direction of increasing entropy is purely that creating a memory is an entropy-increasing act. So how are humans able to remember things while inverted? Actually this probably works just fine – whichever way around you are, entropy in your body is increasing in the same direction you are forming memories, so this is fine.

Entropy war

One big problem to resolve with the premise is to figure out what happens when the entropy of objects moving in opposite directions collide. Regular glass has increasing entropy; what happens when it is shot with an inverted bullet? As we see, a hole gets ‘fixed’ as the bullet comes out of it. So if we trace that glass backwards in time, was the hole there all along? Was the glass installed with a  hole in it?!

One part of the film’s exposition does cover it, but I don’t remember it clearly and haven’t found a transliteration of it online yet. The general idea conveyed is that the overall entropy of the world kind of ‘outweighs’ small-scale reverse entropy. You have a paradox in the form of an inverse bullet firing, and intact glass being manufactured and installed; the overall entropy of the world ‘wins’ (they use some analogy like ‘pissing in the wind’ I think). So presumably that means over a period of time, the bullet holes weirdly form themselves, before being undone again.

That’s sort of okay, and you clearly have to deal with this problem somehow; the weirder part is the crashed silver car from the car chase. How did that wreck get there? Did it just… appear? Is the Tenet organisation trying to keep things tidy, and they had to recover the wreck… while travelling backwards in time… so from a forwards perspective some backwards-moving people put the wreck on the road?!

This rabbit hole is actually crucial, because the whole point of the time-war is that the future wants to reverse the entire world, killing everyone alive today. If everything is always consistent, the protagonist points out, then we already know the future fails to do this, because we’re here. But the ‘piss in the wind’ rule (I wish they’d used a different analogy!) means this isn’t so; if the entropy running backwards is ‘strong’ or ‘big’ enough somehow, it would ‘win’ over the current direction of entropy, and we would die. I really want to go over the dialogue from that scene again…

Edit 2: There’s a further question to this.I can imagine the evil future folk formulating their plan. They write a letter for Sator. They watch an inverted version of themselves apparently digging up an old container and pulling the letter out, then walk backwards into an inverter; they themselves walk forwards into the inverter with the letter. They come out going backwards, and from that point of view they put the letter in the container and bury it. The letter is now inverted through time for Sator to discover. But… where is the letter in the time before Sator gets it? Presumably the instructions include the fact that he needs to bury it again to be consistent with the future, that’s fine – but where was it a year before he got it? Couldn’t someone else end up finding it as it continues to move back in time?!

The Master Plan

While I could follow the moment-to-moment action, I was left a bit confused about the bigger picture. How exactly would Sator’s death lead to the end of the world?

Reading up on things, this is now clear. The ‘evil’ future is communicating with Sator, trying to have him recover all 9 pieces of the Algorithm, then bury them somewhere secure, so that they can later dig that up and use it. Sator has a kind of insurance policy. He has a dead-man’s handle; if he is killed, it will broadcast the GPS co-ordinates of the location to ‘posterity’, meaning the future will then know where it is and be able to recover it. So it’s only safe to kill him if you can make sure the algorithm doesn’t end up buried at those co-ordinates – which the protagonist and his Tenet pals are eventually able to do

The other part that is really just skimmed over: why does the evil ‘future’ want to reverse entropy? They imply climate change is the reason. It almost comes across like a kind of petty revenge for climate change, but it would make more sense if the plan is to actually reverse climate change by reversing the entropy of the earth (or the solar system, or the universe?!). However, that doesn’t quite work – if the entropy of the whole world is now going backwards… then that doesn’t mean CO2 is putting itself back into coal-fired power stations that are turning reverse-electricity into coal that they then ‘bury’. If entropy is reversed all over, then everything keeps moving ‘forwards’ in the normal way. Perhaps the future’s plan is more complicated than we are told, or perhaps I’m not remembering it right… either way it doesn’t quite make sense to me yet.

The Final Twist

One cute theory I’ve seen out there is that perhaps Kat’s son Max is actually… Neil! This would explain the slightly weird emphasis on saving this boy’s life (considered in the film roughly on a par with saving the entire world). But I don’t think it quite adds up other than being ‘nice to think about’ sort of idea. In particular Neil’s actions in response to Kat don’t really match up with this idea. I don’t see any strong evidence for this idea.

Annecy festival 2020 – My Best of the Fest

Going to a short-film festival in a new city is one of my favourite things: it’s the most efficient mind-broadening experience I’ve found. (I previously wrote about that in the context of the Anilogue film festival in Budapest).

With the world in lockdown, the annual festival of animation at Annecy pivoted to take place entirely online. On the one hand, this removes the joy of travel-based adventures – staying in a new place, eating different food, navigating a new public transport system and so on. On the other hand, free from the constraints of scheduling, the scope to consume an incredible range of animations in a short space of time is huge!

One part of the full Annecy online offering

The offer of €15 for access to all of this content from 15th-30th June 2020 is a great deal. Writing this on the 20th, I’ve already consumed over 24+ hours of it. Here’s the highlights of what I’ve seen so far, split into three categories for the shorts (Story, Personal, and Abstract) and then the features.

But first, a sublime highlight from the ‘best of 2019’ selection: Maestro, also known more prosaically as “Opera sung by animals”. Two minutes of exactly that; perfection.

Story

Undone: The Hospital

Computer-assisted rotoscoping could be viewed as a form of ‘cheating’ in animation, but what really matters is what you do with it. In Undone things start out fairly simple, but once the mind-bending segues and loops start up, the medium really comes into its own. We got to see the first episode, which ended as many such shorts do with a tantalising choice. Unlike other shorts, Undone has 7 more episodes to explore that choice, although it unfortunately requires Amazon Prime to view.

If you like films about the nature of reality but don’t like supporting a monopolistic digital behemoth, this leaves you in a tough spot. I’m adding it to my list of such content to attempt to binge in the course of a free trial at some point in the future!

Trailer:

L’Odyssée de Choum

Superficially similar to rotoscoping, I’ve seen ever-more impressive animations that appear to take CG as a base, and then through a combination of textures, filters, and techniques beyond my understanding, render each frame as if it were lovingly painted for a picture-book of some sort.

This seems to be the method in L’Odyssée de Choum, possibly hybridised with more traditional 2D animation – it’s delightfully hard to be sure. Perfect if you like nice stories about animals with a beautiful aesthetic.

Trailer:

The Zillas have a picnic

At the shorter end of the spectrum, Christian Schmidt gets some excellent mileage out of the image of cute roaring kaiju with a translation in a speech bubble. Would be perfect without the uncomfortable moment of horribly-suffering-animal-as-humour near the end.

Rebooted

“Rebooted” by Michael Shanks is a fun and affectionate homage to the techniques of animation in film through the decades. Although it mostly revels in putting stop-motion in a live-action setting, it’s fun (and much rarer) to see cel animation in that context! Happily you can watch the whole thing right here:

Personal

A category for animations that are the singular idiosyncratic vision of one person, or at least feel that way to me.

Genius Loci

My favourite kind of short film to discover – really beautiful painterly animation, sliding between representation, abstraction and metaphor, with an empathetic core that leaves a lasting impression. I felt like the entry price of the festival was worth it for this 16-minute film alone.

Trailer:

Sweet Night

Lia Bertel’s Sweet Night is a beautifully transportive animation: a cerulean, warm-feeling night, the howls of a yeti(?) in the distance, and animal companionship on a dream-like journey. The animation is not as showy as some others in this list, but it excels in that essential aspect of the form: the perfect combination of pictures and sound to create a strong, fascinating impression.

Trailer:

Something to Remember

An animation by Niki Lindroth von Bahr that feels like a strange, vaguely disturbing dream: animals in slightly disconcerting settings sing some sort of lullaby (presumably in Swedish?). Reminds me of the kind of strange thing I might happen upon on Channel 4 late at night in the 90’s.

Trailer:

My Galactic Twin Galaction

One of the ways a personal animation can convey a distinctive ‘voice’ is with a… distinctive voice. That’s what works for My Galactic Twin Galaction by Sasha Svirsky, starring Sasha Svirsky. Rather than tell a story, it’s more like an animated stream-of-consciousness thought-process on how an animation might go. The (I guess) naïve animation style would usually be off-putting, but actually fits well with the idea. The trailer just shows the part in which Svirsky suddenly gets excited about being called upon to fight evil forces and starts singing about it:

Midnight Gospel: Mouse of Silver

It turns out this is a whole 8-episode series available on Netflix right now, and it makes me very disappointed that their algorithm only seems interested in repeatedly putting the same anime and genre B-movies in front of me every time I browse it, when there must be all sorts of amazing stuff like this hidden in their catalogue.

Pendleton Ward (creator of Adventure Time) teams up with Duncan Trussell (who I only knew as the guy who told the story of Tesla vs. Edison while drunk) to produce a… er… very hard to describe, amazing thing.

The format of the series seems to be that they take one of Trussell’s podcast interviews from the past decade, then with some deft editing and in some cases bringing back the interviewee for some scripted lines, weave it into a sort of trippy universe-hopping animation filled with ideas.

The festival showed the episode “Mouse of Silver”, which from what I’ve seen so far is probably the most affecting, concerning as it does an incredibly personal interview of Trussell’s mother Deneen Fendig, when they both know she is close to death after a long battle with cancer. Perhaps that sounds depressing, but it is deeply moving to hear Fendig and Trussell discussing her mindful approach to life, while facing death with clarity, lightness and humour – all while a surreal range of (I assume) Ward’s animation ideas take place as part of the discussion in their own right.

You can get a slight flavour of the thing from this teaser, but it doesn’t really do it justice:

Abstract

4:3 by Ross Hogg

I do enjoy a nice synaesthetic abstract animation; 4:3 by Ross Hogg gets there with treated film and a playful approach, and you can watch it in full here:

A similar technique (I suspect), but a looser connection to the music, was used in Jodie Mack’s 2008 animation to Four Tet’s “A Joy”:

Dune

The excellently curated Black Box strand at the Edinburgh Film Festival was my introduction to purely abstract film. The Annecy equivalent is the ‘off limits’ selection, and Gábor Ulrich’s Dune is a great example of this kind of thing – a top-down view of what appears to be animated white-on-black dune grass, blowing in strange hypnotic patterns in the wind, with a slightly unnerving soundtrack.

This does not appear to be viewable anywhere even in part. However, many of the animators made videos introducing/discussing their work for the festival, and Ulrich’s version perfectly matched the tone of the work:

A Mind Sang / A Mãe De Sangue

The optical illusion of an ambigious image is a very old idea; I haven’t seen a serious attempt to explore that idea in an animated form before though. Vier Nev tries out all sorts of ideas in this short film, and while not all are successful, some are really impressive. You can get a taste of it from the trailer:

Feature-length animations

True North

Animation can be used to cover some very difficult topics, portraying uncomfortable scenes with the slight remove from reality that the animated form affords.

Using a form of CG that appears to be inspired by stop-motion models, True North tells a story inspired by testimonies from survivors of North Korea’s political prison camps, and would be a very hard watch indeed were it told using live action. Nonetheless it conveys the harsh reality, taking place right now, in a way that the occasionally glimpsed newspaper headline can barely begin to evoke.

More information: https://www.truenorth.watch/

Ginger’s Tale

Traditional 2D animation is now very rarely seen at feature length, so it’s always lovely to see something pop up. A Russian production, Ginger’s Tale has some fun and distinctive character designs animated beautifully. That said, the storytelling is rather flawed, and feels like it needed a few more drafts: some (important) characters are rather too thinly drawn, and the plot takes some fairly abrupt turns that aren’t really driven by believable character choices.

It’s also a musical! In the Annecy ‘masterclass’ session, John Clements and Ron Musker (directors of The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Moana among others) shared something they were taught: if you can take a song out of the movie and the story still makes sense, then the song isn’t doing what it should. Unfortunately, that is rather the case with the songs in Ginger’s Tale.

I can’t be too down on it though – as a fan of 2D animation, it was genuinely a joy to watch, and has a memorably plucky and energetic female protagonist in the form of Ginger.

More information: https://ogonekfilm.ru/en/

Trailer:

Lava

Like the shorts listed in the ‘personal’ section above, Lava is the singular vision of Argentinian Ayar Blasco. A sub-genre I have a soft-spot for is “specific and unusual profession saves the world” (made famous by the Dan Brown’s novels in which the world is saved and/or mysteries solved by a professor of history and art); in the case of Lava, it falls to Tattoo artists to save the world from a fascinatingly off-kilter global threat.

A consistently engaging watch, it is only really undermined by a (mercifully somewhat brief) crass racial caricature.

Trailer:

Wrapping up

One thread that came through in several of the masterclasses and discussions was that this is actually a kind of new golden age for animation:

  • Through the internet and digital tools, animation has never been so accessible
  • The content wars in streaming services are leading to all sorts of new animation being commissioned – especially now Disney has taken their huge archive over to their own platform
  • With the world in lockdown, animation seems to be the best-placed form of video that can carry on being produced almost unhindered!

I’m very excited to be able to follow up on the work of some of the artists listed above, and am very grateful to the Annecy festival organisers for the remarkably fast and effective work involved in putting a festival online.