Animated Bafici Fest to feature Hayao Miyazaki, Bill Plympton films

PanARMENIAN.Net - Animated Bafici, the animation-oriented spin-off of the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival, has revealed its upcoming program – a collection that includes the latest from animation legends like Hayao Miyazaki and Bill Plympton, as well as films like this year’s Annecy winner The Boy and the World, The Hollywood Reporter said.

“Our idea is to blend pure, absolutely independent cinema, like Plympton’s Cheatin', with a more industrial one like the sing-along version of Frozen, appealing to the spectator’s independence when choosing what to see,” says fest programmer Juan Manuel Dominguez.

Animated Bafici will also honor the Laika animation studio with a program consisting of Henry Selick’s Coraline, Chris Butley and Sam Fell’s ParaNorman, and Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi’s The Boxtrolls, another hybrid of classic stop-motion and digital technology that will close the festival.

"Laika is perhaps one of the few studios that relate to Animated Bafici’s quest for popular attraction maintaining creative prints. With its stop-motions, Laika has created a toy-ish cinema that’s perfect in its investigations, and so having The Boxtrolls as our closing film defines the place of encounters and discovery we want Bafici to be,” says Dominguez.

Three short film programs will tap into what’s new in the animation scene. In Beyond Anime, CaRTe bLaNChe, the Paris-based company run by Tamaki Okamoto delivers a “who's who” of new Japanese animation, from Mirai Mizue to Kawai & Okamura and Atsushi Wada. Basuritas includes a compilation of 10 works by Spanish animator Alberto Gonzalez Vazquez. Exterior World brings a landscape of short films, completed with artist David O’Reilly’s videogame Mountain.

“This is a time in which we are slaves to the multiplexes' offer, so to expand and mix short film programs of rare visibility with David O’ Reilly’s Mountain videogame and works in progress from Argentine studios means not believing in high and low culture, or agendas, and simply trusting the power of animation and the people’s will to see any kind of cinema," Dominguez says about the mix.

Animated Bafici will also program two outdoor screenings: Miyazaki’s last film before retiring, The Wind Rises, which premiered last year in Venice, and Disney’s original The Jungle Book. "These two films draw a perfect line in which animation can be strong, memorable, invincible in its cinephilia, and, above all, happily keen to both new and experienced audiences”, says Dominguez.

Animated Bafici runs Sept. 25 to 28.