Fantasia’s annual showcase of amazing animation from around the world returns with a dazzling dozen offerings, marvelously multifarious in in tone, technique and perspective. Things kick off with two World premieres from South Korea: THE FIRST CLASS, Kim Myung-eun’s charming, playful little romp through the systematized soul-crushing of conformist tyranny, and Han Seong-heun’s BARCHESTRA, in which a bartender’s shift concludes with a lively musical flight of fancy. Two North American premieres are on the menu as well: STRANGE CREATURES, a hand-tinted stop-motion fable from Chile’s Cristobal León (a director of the alternative animation hit LA CASA LOBO) and Cristina Sitja, and U.K./Italian animator Chiara Sgatti’s THE THING I LEFT BEHIND.
FLUFFICTION, from Japan’s Yoshiki Imazu, is a cavalcade of heretofore unheard-of critters, great and small, cute and hirsute. Pubescent pimples and petty persecutions pepper MIMI, Denmark-based Lisa Fukaya’s poem in pink. LE VOL, from Martinique’s Alain Bidard (BATTLEDREAM CHRONICLE), presents a survivor’s reflections on loss, grief, and the struggle to build again. From France comes Frédéric Doazan’s HURLEVENT, a typhoon of typographic turmoil. A panoply of performative personas peel away to reveal the real self in the racy, graceful claymation affirmation LOVE ME FEAR ME, from Germany’s Veronica Solomon. Eusong Lee’s South Korea/U.S. production MY MOON charts a love triangle between heavenly bodies, and former Montrealer Yves Paradis’ M52 is an animated experiment in improvisational narrative that yields breathtaking results — a mesmerizing science-fiction journey. And beware Neil Christopher and Daniel Gies’ GIANT BEAR, an Inuit spin on the colossal-monster genre! – Rupert Bottenberg
