Recap:  Annecy International Animation Film Festival (2024)

Recap: Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2024 🎨

The largest animation film festival in the world took place last month in the beautiful town of Annecy, France, and over the seven-day festival, filmmakers and movie enthusiasts alike got the chance to see world premieres of upcoming movies, sneak peaks at future projects, and meet creators looking to bring their imaginations to life through the work in progress section of the festival.

I have reviews up for some noteworthy feature films, like Chang’an (one of my favourite films of the year), which showcased another impressive year of animation coming out of China (last year China had Deep Sea, which in my opinion should’ve been nominated for an Oscar), and Ultraman: Rising (my favourite surprise of the year, now streaming on Netflix), which was a wonderful introduction to a franchise I’ve never given a chance to.

Those films were testaments to the power of animation, whereas these films I chose to highlight are upcoming releases and projects that are currently a work in progress but very much worth every bit of your future consideration.

The first concept I became obsessively interested in was an arthouse action-adventure film that is currently looking for funding, and fingers crossed it gets it—and that is The Beckoning (second slide). Beckoning’s story follows a group of astronauts who, while travelling through space, mysteriously end up crash landing on medieval earth, where they struggle to survive a witch hunt led by inquisition knights, which the creator Sava Živković described as “The Revanent meets Lost in Space.”

I’m currently reading Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series, and The Beckoning felt like it captured the blending of eras aspect of that world, which makes for a wonderfully distorted sense of time that, when paired with the unreal engine and CG animation style, grounds the entire story with an uncanny valley realism you can only find in a dream.

That’s one I think sci-fi and fantasy fans should definitely keep an eye on.

Last but not least is a project I never thought would see the light of day, but now has an official release date of December 14th of this year, and that is the anime (yes, anime) Lord of the Rings original story titled The War of Rohirrim. This will be directed by Kenji Kamiyama, who worked on all of the sequels to Ghosts in the Shell and even directed an episode of Star Wars: Visions: The Ninth Jedi.

Not only do I have all the faith in the project based on the few stills I’ve seen, but the fact that the grumpy, Shakespearean-trained Brian Coxx (Succession’s Logan Roy) is leading the film is another reason you have to buy-in.
I expect the trailer to be matched up with the Deadpool and Wolverine release, so I’m guessing it’ll be out fairly soon, or second guess will be near TIFF if they believe it has Best Picture at the Oscar’s potential. I’ll have it posted on my story as soon as it does.

Those are some of the projects we have to look forward to, and another year of Annecy is in the books. It’s by far my favourite festival to cover, and hopefully I get the chance to cover it again next year—until then.

Thank you for reading! 🍿

Recap of the 2024 Annecy International Animation Film Festival The Richmond Reviewer

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