ANIFEST 2012: PUPPETS AND MORE!

An amazing review by the great Wolfgang Matzl (pictures also credited to Wolfgang)

AniFest is an annual animation festival in Teplice, a small town in the northern Czech Republic.

This year the whole festival was a celebration of puppet films!

The organizers celebrated the 100th birthday of famous Czech filmmaker Jiří Trnka with a retrospective of his films and short films. More unique was an exposition showcasing dozens of his original puppets, storyboards, rare photos and more.

Honorary president was Barry Purves – seeing his short films ("Next" and "Screen Play" among others) on the big screen and his inspiring lecture afterwards were quite a treat. 

Other highlights were presentations by studios like Se-Ma-For from Poland (they brought along the Peter puppet from "Peter and the Wolf") and Studio Laika from Portland, USA who showed some new clips from "Paranorman" and had some great behind-the-scenes footage from "Coraline". (Animator Eric Leighton trying not to set his shirt on fire when animating the scene where Miss Spink and Forcible are performing in front of Coraline). The puppets of Coraline and Other Father were also attending the presentation.

British historian Paul Wells presented a very interesting selection of British stop-motion animations in 3 programmes (from early "Dreams of Toyland" to Nick Park and Brothers Quay to contemporary shorts like "The Eagleman Stag")

Will Vinton was also on the jury, "The Adventures of Mark Twain" and shorts like "Closed Mondays" and "The Great Cognito" were screened.

But my personal highlight of the AniFest festival must be the presentation by Ian Mackinnon. Mackinnon & Saunders is the remarkable studio from Manchester/UK which builds the delicate puppets for movies like "Corpse Bride", "The Fantastic Mr. Fox" and the upcoming "Frankenweenie", among others. 

The presentation itself was very fascinating with lots of unique behind-the-scenes pictures of their puppet-making. One gem was a short clip of stop motion test-footage from "Mars Attacks". (The original plan was to shoot the martians with puppets).

Mr. Mackinnon was not alone and brought with him some small friends: the sandman (Paul Berry's "The Sandman"), Victor and Victoria from "Corpse Bride", a Victor armature, and last but not least Mr. Fox himself from "The Fantastic Mr. Fox". To see these puppets in person was a dream come true.

The whole festival was an exciting experience and I am looking forward to returning next year.