The International Animated Films Festival of Catalonia (ANIMAC) closes its 15th edition

Lleida (ACN).- The International Animation Festival of Catalonia was held in Lleida from Thursday night to last Sunday. The festival repeated last year’s good results: 18,000 spectators also participated in this year’s edition, mostly families and school-students. However, 200 professionals from the sector participated in the event and parallel activities, such as workshops and master classes. Disney's creative artist Shamik Majumdar was at the festival, as well as Phil Mulloy, who gave a master class. In addition, the fist forum for TV professionals was held. Liu Yi Wang, in charge of selecting animation films for public Chinese TVs, attended and bought several products to be broadcasted in the four TV channels he is responsible for. The festival next year’s edition will be held in new audiovisual production centre, which is being built in Lleida. The centre, called ‘Magical' will host new companies related to the animated film industry.

The International Animated Films Festival of Catalonia kicked off on Thursday with the projection of ‘The Boys’. The movie is about the composers of Disney classical scores, such as ‘Mary Poppins’ or ‘The Jungle Book’, the brothers Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman.

The festival showed the nominations for the “best short animation feature” in the 2011 Goya Awards: ‘Vicenta’ and ‘Exlibris’. The finalists of the prestigious Clermont Ferrand short-movie festival were also shown: the Basque ‘La Gran carrera’ (The Big Race), the Italian ‘Big bang big boom’ or the Dutch ‘Get Real’. Among the Catalan animation artists, the works from Anna Solans and Marc Riba found also a place in the festival’s programme.

The section “the Chinese schools” showed a selection of short movies made by students from Chinese animated film schools. The works from one of the pioneers of the Chinese animated film industry, Te Wei, were also shown. In the 1940s, Te Wei was part of the Shanghai studios, the most important at the time. In 1960s, the industry disappeared due to the Cultural Revolution, but in the 1970s it re-appeared again.