On Sunday, Aug. 15, Chris Robinson, director of Ottawa’s International Student Animation Festival (safo), got the kind of bad-news phone call that no one wants to receive. Barely two months before his festival was due to begin, the office he occupies with the Canadian Film Institute had been burned out by an electrical fire caused by the short-circuiting of a computer monitor.

When he arrived the scene was gut wrenching. Computers had been melted down into globs of plastic and metal. Overheated fluorescent lights dripped down from the ceiling tiles like wax stalactites. Most of Robinson’s books, videos, archives, records and catalogues were either torched or a sodden mess, drenched when firemen came in to fight the blaze.

Luckily for Robinson and safo, an insurance claim was quickly processed, and by week’s end, his festival’s office had been relocated in another, untouched area of Ottawa’s Arts Court Building.

By early October, Robinson is on track to make this second edition of safo, Oct 21-24, much larger and more diverse than the inaugural 1997 version. A website has been established, the catalogue has gone to press and safo’s staff of eight plus Robinson is ready for the rigors of a four-day festival.

‘We were alright once we set up a new home, dusted off the files and found our mailing list. We only lost video copies of festival films. Fortunately, no films had arrived before the fire took place.’

Robinson viewed 745 films, or at least video versions of them, before making final selections for the festival.

Unlike SAFO 97, which had only two categories for student films, finished and unfinished (pencil tests), this year’s crop is divided into five sections – children’s films (under 12 years), secondary level (high school), films by undergraduate college students, post-graduate films and first films by professionals.

According to Robinson, safo is no longer intended to be just a showcase for college students, ‘it’s really an emerging filmmaker festival’ now.

In his quest for new styles and faces in animation, Robinson doesn’t mind criticizing classical animation and narration. He isn’t an advocate of Sheridan College’s much-touted undergraduate animation program. Not one Canadian school made the final cut in the Schools in Competition section of safo. The only honorable mention among Canadian entrantss was given to Vancouver’s Emily Carr College, an art school which doesn’t stream students into commercial animation jobs.

Robinson says he sees too many emerging Canadian animators moving quickly into television production or mainstream filmmaking. The selections at safo reflect his concerns.

Choosing Ottawa native Suzanne Lebreque’s Pasa Doble for the festival is a bit of a political statement for Robinson. He saw the film at Sheridan’s Open House, an annual event that tends to honor craft and technique. ‘It was the only film that reflected any sort of individual expression….I felt it was really important to pick Pasa Doble for safo and honor [Lebreque] here,’ he says.

Another Ottawa animator, Nick Cross, has made a film that will open the festival. Tea for Two is simply drawn, featuring a bunny rabbit and a farmer. The bunny reads from the paper in Swedish and, quite rapidly, the farmer starts disagreeing with him. Film students and cinephiles will recognize the dialogue as being the debate on mortality between Death and the Knight from Ingmar Bergman’s classic The Seventh Seal.

Other Canadian films include Hans Samuelson’s Men With Ties, a collage piece that satirizes consumerism and coffee culture; Sylvie Chartrand’s painterly Le Temps d’Aimer; and Jakub Pistecky’s Tim Burton-influenced Little Milos.

And just to show his lighter side, Robinson has also picked Bryce Hallett’s Tiny Little Love Story, which is ‘a pencil test, from Sheridan – and it’s classical animation. But it’s just a wonderful Tex Avery-like gag film.’

The Canadian films will join a host of international selections in the jockeying for awards at safo. Among the prizes offered will be $1,000 from Nelvana for the Best Graduate Student Film, $1,000 from Atlanta-based Cartoon Network for Best First Film, $1,000 from Teletoon for Best Film by a Child (under 12), a complete package of Maya software from Alias|Wavefront for Best Computer Animated Film, $750 from ASIFA Canada for Best Canadian Film, $500 for the Director’s Prize – a Robinson choice – prizes for Artistic Achievement in Animation Education and a safo Grand Prize. Every winner will receive a glass-blown sculpture designed by artist Robert Frith.

The Animarket, where students and interested members of the animation community can find out what schools and studios are offering, is, once again, quite well subscribed. The Ottawa School of Art, Algonquin College, Seneca and Sheridan have booths where they can share their programs with interested students. Specialty channels Teletoon, Nickelodeon and mtv are represented at the market as are the National Film Board, Motion Digital and the Animation World Network.

safo will also be marked by the quality and variety of its retrospectives. Independent animator George Griffin will be on hand for a rare screening of his most important works. To mark the nfb’s 60th anniversary, there will be a retrospective on the career of the creator of The Big Snit, Richard Condie, and a valuable look at the films of the first head of the nfb’s French animation unit, Rene Jodoin. They will be joined by a survey of the videos of Run Wrake, a recent graduate of Britain’s Royal College of Art, who works with U2 and Howie B.

Comprehensive looks at the work of Sweden’s Filmtecknarna, Toronto’s Cuppa Coffee Animation and u.s. studio Collosal are at safo because Robinson believes ‘they are all studios that do commercial work but do it in an artistic way.’

Karen Mazurkewich, author and documentarian, will offer a historical look at animated commercials in Canada, while Gerben Schermer, director of the Holland Animation Festival, has created a survey of animated commercials throughout Europe.

Commercials, rock videos and tv offer job opportunities for animation school graduates. ‘That’s the other point of these retrospectives: to provide some educational tools for the animators coming here,’ says Robinson.

Will safo continue after this year? There is pressure for Robinson to turn the biennial adult animation festival, oiaf, into a yearly event. Still, ‘I felt we changed some lives two years ago,’ he recalls. ‘And maybe changed some film courses, too.’ Only time will tell.