"Further, the festival is proud to be rechristening its animation jury prize as The Satoshi Kon Award for Achievement in Animation, named after the dear, departed visionary whose feature debut, Perfect Blue, world premiered at Fantasia in 1997 (as did his later Millenium Actress)."
As a tease, here are several key selections from this year's AXIS lineup. Stay tuned for the full lineup to be announced on July 11. Portrait of Satoshi Kon courtesy of Laurent Koffel.
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At Variety, Richard Kuipers states that "Yuen Sang-ho gets his message across with undeniable fury and a good measure of intelligence." At The Hollywood Reporter, Maggie Lee writes: "Ugly, pitiless, and mightily provocative in its representation of human debasement, [Yeun Sang-ho's] satire on class inequality burns like acid." Lee adds: "Technically adept and highly cinematic in its storytelling, the $150,000 production proves that it is still possible to produce quality animation with a modest budget. Sketched in stark, masculine strokes on a somber, dusky color palette, the human figures are made to look distorted and beastlike. It is as if their malice and misery have seeped into their facial features and are refracted as a snarl, a burrowed eyebrow or clenched teeth." At Twitch, Brian Clark adds: "The animation isn't going to win any awards for aesthetic beauty, but it's blunt, less-than-fluid style suits the subject matter perfectly. The medium also allows the film to dabble in some surreal, hallucinogenic imagery that mirrors the characters' psyches. Like the film's style, it's effective in an immediately-visceral way, but at the same time, these scenes are structured and directed in a way to where they play more like sudden jump-scares in a horror movie."
At Variety, Jonathan Holland writes: "Featuring lovable but credible characters and a beautifully crafted, understated plot that emerges elegantly from their fears, fantasies and forgetfulness, this thought-provoking, universally comprehensible item skews naturally towards adult auds, but its animated format could plausibly appeal to a younger demographic." At The Hollywood Reporter, Neil Young considers this "poignant" and "exceptional" animated feature about senior citizens to be "one the year's best Spanish films." He writes that Wrinkles "takes a commendably unsentimental and nuanced approach to a complex subject, one that avoids melodramatic situations and simplistic characterizations while adhering to certain conventions of this particular sub-genre."
At Screen, Lisa Nesselson writes: "A visually splendid and emotionally satisfying animated adventure for all ages, Zarafa boasts all the ingredients (at least in an ideal world…) for international success, starting with a terrific fact-inspired story, simply yet beautifully told."
