Matt Schley
April 18, 2019 
Every year, France’s Annecy International Animated Film Festival features a special program devoted to the animation of a selected country. This year, for the first time in 20 years, that country is Japan.
That’s the word from an Annecy press conference held in Tokyo today.
The special program is titled New Motion: The Next of Japanese Animation, and it’ll take place during the Annecy festival from June 10 to 15.
The program will feature a “Creator’s File,” featuring 26 of Japan’s up-and-coming young animators. Six of those animators appeared at the press conference, including Kiyotaka Oshiyama (Space Dandy), Hiroko Utsumi (Banana Fish) and Hiroshi Kobayashi (Hisone and Misotan).
Some of the young animators featured in the “Creator’s File.”
The festival will also feature:
- Screenings of projects from Anime Tamago, a a young animator training project.
- Workshops for animation students around the world to learn Japanese animation techniques.
- A “live animation” screening featuring Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” played live as an AI animates to the music in real time.
- An outdoor screening of Lupin the Third: Castle of Cagliostro against the backdrop of the Château d’Annecy.
- An AR collaboration between Makoto Shinkai (Your Name) and Japan’s AR3Bros, in which flowers and other vegetation used in Shinkai’s films can be viewed in a spherical display.
- A VR exhibition created by animator Kaoru, in which users “become” an animation character and have a conversation with the audience watching the anime.
Annecy will also feature the feature films Ride Your Wave, The Wonderland, Relative Worlds and Children of the Sea in its competition section.
A prototype of the Makoto Shinkai AR project.
Source: Press conference
