I have introduced the biennial “Hiroshima International Animation Festival” before, which is the most historic Asian animation activity. But in fact, in Taiwan, a place much closer to where we are, there has been a great animation event worth for animators in Hong Kong and Macao to participate in recent years. Recently, I was invited to act as a judge for this activity. And naturally, I will give you a live report.  

First, I would like to introduce some historical background. In 2003, the first “Taiwan International Animation Festival (TIAF)” was held in Taipei with the help of the Taiwan Film Institute. This animation festival had been held for five consecutive years due to its good reputation. However, after becoming a relatively large scale, it ended in 2008, which was a pity for both domestic and foreign animators.

In 2015, under the city development policy of achieving a creative and lifestyle capital, the idea of promoting film and television through film festivals became a main focus in Taichung and “animation” was selected as the city’s film festival theme. With the help of Information Bureau of Taichung City Government, the first “TIAF Taichung International Animation Festival” was kicked off, which makes TIAF back to the ranks of global animation festivals and becomes the International communication platform for animation.

TIAF is in its fifth year. The 10-day event, which ran from October 11 to 20, included the section of Feature Screening, Special Director in Focus, Studio and Competition. There was a tight schedule of screenings, most of which would be shared lately by directors after the screenings. I was one of the five judges in this festival, along with two German animators Raimund Krumme and Max Hattler, Taiwanese animation director Wen-Ming Hsieh and Gints Zilbalodis, a young animation director from Latvia. Our job was to watch seven screenings of total 60 works in three days and choose eight awards from them, which was a real pleasure for me, a super animation fan.

The TIAF competition was divided into two categories: the short film competition and the student short film competition. There were four prizes in each category, including Grand Prix, Jury Distinctive Award, Outstanding Work Award and Best of Taiwan. The winners would receive up to NTD500,000 and trophy, which was quite rich. The total number of entries for the competition of this year was 2,201, breaking the previous record. Among them, there were 1,983 overseas works and 218 works from Taiwan. After an initial review, the remaining 60 works entered the final.

It is not a small accomplishment to be selected among the numerous works. After each screening, we would spend half an hour to have a small discussion to determine everyone’s favourites. And then on the date of 14, we would complete the whole review process and decide the awards in a six-hour meeting. The whole process went very well.

Talking back to the 60 selected works, several of them were the winners of other animation festivals, but we still evaluated them from an overall perspective. Based on the different tastes and animation backgrounds of the five judges, the results were representative without losing TIAF’s personality, which was the most gratifying thing. The latest animation works focus on two categories in terms of technology, one is hand-drawn animation, and the other one is stop-motion animation, while the latter accounts for most of the selected works this year. However, there were also several experimental computer animation films produced with the latest computer animation technology. When I watched these films, I was not only amazed by the development of the technology, but also happy to see many works that maintain the traditional animation technology. After all, I am always one of them.

Another small discovery is that the average level of students’ works is higher than the average professional works, which is believed to be an achievement of global animation education. Students’ graduation works are no longer the immature attempts, the schools have very high requirements for them. For students, the first work can be nominated for International large-scale animation festival, what a glorious thing. Therefore, the recent student works were extraordinary.

It was a pity that there is only one Hong Kong work among the shortlist, and it was made by student studying in Canada. As far as I know, the deadline of this year’s TIAF was relatively early, and many Hong Kong animations, especially the students’ works, were not able to register in time, which naturally missed an opportunity. Therefore, I hereby specially remind the animators from Hong Kong and Macao not to miss the next year’s TIAF.

As for the details of the selected works and the winning results, they have not been announced yet. So, I will leave them for the next time.