Chris Robinson, executive director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, says the big difference between this year and others is the presence and strength of the Internet.

‘For the first time we have a category for Internet animation. Animation made for the Internet is very primitive, most is just not there yet. It’s maybe a little like computer animation when that first started appearing. People were so obsessed with computer animation they weren’t thinking about what to do with it, there was no idea behind it. [Perhaps that will come with the Net] once we get past the ‘Aw, shucks’ of it,’ says Robinson.

‘The sad thing is that it’s supposed to be something new that would liberate the medium. All we’re seeing on Internet channels are series – we’re falling into the same trap. Animators can’t find a slot on tv because tv is constructed around 22-minute time slots, and it seems that the Internet is already falling into that.’

However, for now the Net makes up only a small part of the festival’s entries: this year 1,300 films were entered and less than 50 were Internet films. Of these, the selection committee chose nine.

This year for the first time festival selection was split between commissioned and non-commissioned material for a fair comparison of projects.

Non-commissioned films are to be judged in the categories of independent short films, graduate films, films made for children and first professional film.

The categories in the commissioned competition are advertising film, station id, music video, educational, tv special, tv series and show reel. Animation for the Internet has its own category.

The selection process has not been without its controversial moments, in particular the rejection of Alexander Petrov’s Oscar-winning animated imax film The Old Man and the Sea. ‘Winning the Oscar, that’s very nice, but we don’t choose films because they’ve won awards,’ says Robinson. ‘In the end it just comes down to personal taste, and in the end we’re just trying to encourage diversity. We want to show things that haven’t been seen before.

‘We have one [Helen Hill’s Canadian independent Mouseholes] in competition that you might think ‘What the hell is this?’ But this person had an idea. They didn’t have money, but were going to get it done. We’re interested in ideas, not just the execution necessarily. We want to see both. Ideas are lacking in animation.’

And why is this so?

Robinson places some blame at the door of educational institutions. ‘You can go back to funding cuts [to see the origin of the lack of ideas]. Part of it is schools need to find new resources, so they are all latching on to industry. There are a few examples of schools teaching art and teaching [students] to be individual, but too many are recreating what’s out there already. So many schools are coming up now and capitalizing on the popularity of animation; they just want successful hiring stats.

‘At the student festival [held in alternate years with the Ottawa International Animation Festival] we see the last vestiges of independent animation and then they’re swallowed up by industry.’ *

– www.awn.com/ottawa/ottawa00/