Annecy 2023’s opening ceremony began as Annecy International Animation Film Festival events do—with a crowd folding up paper airplanes (these ones branded after the film showing, Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Streams) and chucking them at the stage, any that made it from high up in the stands to the podium met with cheers. 

After that, a typically jovial introduction from Annecy artistic director Marcel Jean, delivering speeches in both French and English, switching to the latter to highlight that as festival-goers this year, we’ll “meet fantastic Mexican artists, queer artists and eat the most delectable tartiflette.” Jean’s speech generally embraced intersectionality and internationality, which was a rather soothing attitude after the storm of xenophobia stoked by opportunists following a tragic and hateful knife attack in the town just a few days ago. 

Annecy is the world’s largest animation-focused film festival, this year attracting almost 14,000 illustrators, background artists, CGI experts, stop-motion makers, distributors, studios and more. The 47th edition has a special focus on Mexican animation, with noted filmmakers including Guillermo del Toro and Jorge R. Gutierrez showing up. 

Before the main feature, a couple of short films played, the first being Kikiriki (onomatopoeia for the call of a cockerel), directed by Mexican 2D animator Ram Tamez (who previously made The Beast). It’s a sweet little short about a cockerel walking the streets of Annecy before serenading another bird, in black and white imagery imitating the look of a dug up 1930s film before switching into 16:9 and full color when love strikes the two birds. 

The other was a little more high profile—the world premiere of a short film celebrating Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 100th year. Once Upon a Studio is directed by Dan Abraham and Trent Correy, animators and story artists on a number of the studio’s films such as Moana and Encanto, and directed a Frozen tie-in short together, the similarly-named Once Upon a Snowman. Their film is dedicated to “the artists that came before us”, and on a more personal level to Burny Mattinson, a beloved animator and longest serving employee, who had been working at the studio for 70 years, which as Abraham and Correy noted was “longer than Walt Disney had been alive”. (They also noted that he kept working on pencil and paper). 

In that spirit, the short itself had a hundred years of Disney characters emerge from pictures on the walls of the studio to take a group photo, tying in a number of fun visual gags as they all try to organize those chaotic personalities into one space. The studio was filmed with live action photography as the animated characters moved through it, Abraham and Correy proudly noting that they had coaxed some retired animators back to the fold.

This year’s opening ceremony culminated in a screening of one of the competition films, the aforementioned Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Streams. It’s one of the last films to be released from a list I highlighted a few years back in previous Annecy coverage (when it was called “…and the Kingdom of the Winds”), proving the importance of Annecy as a work-in-progress showcase, and demonstrating just how long animated works of art can take.  

Directed by Benoît Chieux, who wrote with Alain Gagnol (A Cat in Paris), Sirocco follows two girls as they are transported to the world of a series of books they love, written by their mother’s friend. It is funny, strange and sweet, an invigorating start to a festival no doubt full of the same kind of imagination.