The Holland Animation Film Festival skipped its autumn edition this year and moves to the spring of 2012, but the Netherlands Film Festival (NFF, 21-30 September) ensured that animation lovers won’t miss out on anything. The Dutch animation film is internationally reputed and acclaimed for its high standards. HAFF and NFF have organised an extensive programme of animations which excellently showcases these standards.
The Audience Award Dutch Animation of the HAFF this year stopped over at the NFF. The NFF animations from the Annual Survey and the New Crop have been bundled together in three sections where they competed for the audience’s favour. The winner will be a special guest at the HAFF in March 2012.
Under the header The Cutting Edge, the exciting and innovative animation practice on the Internet has been showcased with ground-breaking Dutch shorts and commercials from the international Stash Magazine. The programme also offered a representative survey of the best productions from animation academies in the Netherlands and Belgium in the past twenty years that won the competition for student films at the HAFF. There was a section focussing on the ninetieth birthday of the Danish/Dutch animation master Børge Ring, who worked for the Toonder Studios for years and won an Oscar with the touching film Anna & Bella.
The HAFF and Utrecht University, the Centre for the Humanities and the Department of Media & Culture Studies, jointly presented the first CFH-HAFF Festival Fellow. Paul Ward (UK, lecturer at the Arts University College Bournemouth) delivers a lecture on Friday 23 September, entitled Dark Intervals, Mechanics and Magic: Animated Movement as the Illusion of Life.
On Friday 23 September there's also been a spectacular show VJ on the Dom, with Motomichi Nakamura from Japan/Ecuador performing for HAFF.