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Annecy, France — José Miguel Ribeiro, Nuno Beato and David Doutel and Vasco Sá, iconic figures in modern-day Portuguese animation, will unveil new projects at this year’s Annecy. They will be joined by newer talents – Vier Nev, behind “A Mind Sang” – João Carrilho, Patrícia Figueiredo and Natália Azevedo Andrade – who together deliver an eloquent snapshot of the burgeoning state of Portuguese animation.

Over the last 30 years, Portuguese animation has won ever more prizes for usually 2D short films of dazzling beauty, experimentation and sometimes social point. The career of Regina Pessoa, who delivers a masterclass at Annecy, is a case in point.

Animation remains in Portugal a vocational passion. In one case in point, Ribeiro, after scoring praise and plaudits with feature film “Nayola,” will present a short film, “The Flower and the Fish,” which marks another new direction in vastly eclectic career.

Yet Portuguese animation is in the throes of industry take-off.

As ever more Portuguese directors plan their first animated feature, Annecy is staging a timely Tribute to Portuguese Animation, its 2024 Country of Honor, with a seven section spread of key titles.

Variety has made its own selection of that selection, profiling modern milestones such as Abi Feijo’s “The Outlaws” and José Miguel Ribeiro’s “The Suspect” and taking in Regina Pessoa’s “Uncle Thomas, Accounting for the Days,” the dazzling 2D of Bap, Zagreb Animafest winner “The Garbage Man” and Oscar-nominated ‘Ice Merchants.”

There’s a larger narrative to the titles: the step-by-step and very often collaborative growth of a craft industry of social point and high artistic ambition prized at home and ever more abroad.

As multiple leading lights of the Portugal’s animation industry contemplate feature film creation, Annecy’s Tribute is a reminder of what Portugal has already achieved.

Some highlights:

“Ice Merchants,” (João Gonzalez, 2022)

Portugal’s first ever Oscar nominee,...

Organizers of the Ibero-American Animation Quirino Awards on Friday presented 25 finalists as part of the Malaga Film Festival’s Mafiz-Spanish Screenings Content Animation Hub section.

The 25 works from seven countries will compete in 10 categories at the seventh edition of the Ibero-American Animation Quirino Awards, taking place on May 11 in Tenerife.

Spain tops the list of countries with the most entries, 16, followed by Brazil with seven and Chile with three. Argentina, Mexico and Portugal are present with two nominations each, while Colombia has one nomination.

Leading with the most nominations are Spain’s “Robot Dreams,” by Pablo Berger, which is also competing for the best animated feature film Oscar, and the Brazilian short “Lulina e a Lua,” by Marcus Vinicius Vasconcelos and Alois Di Leo, with three each.

Best Feature Film

“Hanna and the Monsters”

Spanish animation dominates the Best Feature Film category with three out of four nominations, including “Hanna and the Monsters,...

Spain’s 7th Ibero-American Quirino Animation Awards has found its jury for next year, to be held over May 9-11.

The jury is led by animation directors José Miguel Ribeiro from Portugal, Colombian Marcela Rincón and Wesley Louis (U.K.) alongside Zane Valeniece, director of acquisitions at Latvian public television (Ltv) and Emmanuèle Petry, head of international sales at Dandelooo, France.

Meanwhile, Bea Bartolomé and José Luis Farias, director and executive producer of the Quirino Awards respectively, will be present at Ventana Sur to help announce the Ibermedia Next winners on Nov. 29

An initiative of regional fund Ibermedia, in which the Quirino Awards has been collaborating for several years, Ibermedia Next is a funding scheme aimed at backing innovation and new technological tools in animation and/or open source tools.

Juror Ribeiro is best known for his debut feature film ” “Nayola,” which collected 18 international awards, including best feature film at the 2022 Quirino Awards,...

The sixth edition of the Quirino Awards, an annual event dedicated to the promotion of animation in Spain, Portugal and Latin America, saw a triumph for Portuguese cinema, with animations from the country taking home four of the nine awards.

The Quirino Awards also proved a veritable showcase of Portugal’s rich animation history– apt as the event also marked the centenary of animation in Portugal.

The feature film “Nayola,” helmed by Portuguese director José Miguel Ribeiro, walked off with the best feature film award.

The film, a Praça Filmes production, is a moving depiction of three generations of Angolan women grappling with the aftermath of the civil war that devastated their country in the late 20th century. Ribeiro’s first feature, “Nayola,” which premiered in main competition at the Annecy Animation Festival in 2022, is based on the play “A Caixa Preta” by Eduardo Agualusa and Mia Coutode. Its bold color palette,...

Films take top awards in Mexican and Iberoamerican competition sections.

Claudia Sainte Luce’s The Realm Of God) and Sivina Schnicer and Ulises Porra’s Carajita swept the prizes at the Guadalajara International Film Festival, which wrapped on June 18.

Sainte Luce’s coming -of- age tale, which world premiered in the Berlinale’s Generation Kplus sidebar, won four prizes in the Mexican Film competition, including best film worth 25,000, best cinematography, actor and director. The director’s previous credits include The Amazing Catfish in 2013.

Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic-Argentinan coproduction Carajita dominated the Iberoamerican competition section, winning best film and 25,000, best director,...

Claudia Sainte-Luce’s “El reino de Dios” (“The Realm of God”) and “Carajita” by Silvina Schnicer and Ulises Porra took home the bulk of the prizes in their respective categories, the Mayahuel for best Mexican film and best Ibero-American film at the 37th Guadalajara Int’l Film Fest (Ficg), which wrapped June 18.

Festival highlights included a conversation, albeit by remote, between festival director Estrella Araiza and Guadalajara native Guillermo del Toro who talked about the making of his upcoming stop-motion animation feature, “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.” The film, set to bow on Netflix in December, was filmed with 20 animators in more than 60 sets in Canada and Guadalajara, Del Toro revealed.

Sainte-Luce’s coming-of-age drama about a young boy’s struggle with his faith as he’s about to take his first communion, which world premiered at the Berlinale’s Generation Kplus sidebar, also won Ficg’s Mezcal awards for best cinematography,...

“Little Nicholas – Happy As Can Be” scooped this year’s Annecy Animation Festival’s top Cristal Award for best feature, an award which can form a springboard for Oscar nomination, as was the case with “Flee” last year, or “I Want My Body” in 2019.

The biggest winners at Annecy this year, however, was the Festival itself, animation at large and, when it came to movie prizes, France in particular.

‘Little Nicholas – Happy as Can Be’: Annecy Cristal, Best Feature

Directed by Benjamin Massoubre and Amandine Fredon, Annecy’s feature winner is classic French animated feature fare in artistic and industrial confection: 2D, based on a literary source – writer René Goscinny and illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempé’s comic-strip, and featuring famed Gallic IP: Little Nicholas, France’s quintessential schoolboy, who here meets his makers, Goscinny and Sempé.

In industry terms, “Little Nicholas” is produced by Aton Soumache and producer of “The Little Prince,...

New titles from Michel Hazanavicius, Nora Twomey.

Screen is on the ground at the 46th Annecy International Animation Festival this week, where work-in-progress titles are presented as part of both the main festival, and separately in the Mifa market.

Here are three films from each side to look out for in the coming months:

Festival

The Most Precious of Cargoes (Fr-Bel) dir. Michel Hazanavicius

Having won five Oscars for 2011’s The Artist, and most recently opened Cannes with zombie comedy Final Cut, French stalwart Hazanavicius is making his animation feature debut with this adaptation of a 2019 book of the same...

José Miguel Ribeiro’s feature debut “Nayola,” one of two Portuguese full-length animation pics screening at Annecy Animation Film Festival, portrays the fate of a grandmother, a mother and her daughter – Lelena, Nayola and Yara – in the aftermath of the Angolan civil war.

Nayola searches for her husband, Ekumbi, who went missing during the war. She abandons her daughter, Yara, at the age of only two, who is then brought up by her grandmother, Lelena. By 2011, she has become a rebellious teenage rapper.

The pic jumps back and forth between 1995 and 2011, moving between richly saturated images of the Angolan landscape and grim, gray-toned images of wartime destruction and urban decay, weaving together real-life settings and dreamscapes.

Based on the stage play “A Caixa Preta” (The Black Box), by Angolan playwright José Eduardo Agualusa and Mozambican novelist Mia Couto, the script was penned by Ribeiro’s long-time collaborator Virgilio Almeida.

The...

“Plan 75,” Hayakawa Chie’s Japanese dystopian drama which world premiered at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, has been sold in a raft of territories by Urban Sales.

The movie is set in Japan, in a near future where a government program called Plan 75 encourages senior citizens to be voluntarily euthanized in order to remedy the aging society. The film weaves the stories of an elderly woman who isn’t able to live independently, a pragmatic Plan 75 salesman and a young Filipino caregiver. “Plan 75” stars Chieko Baisho (“Howl’s Moving Castle”) and Hayato Isomura, among others.

Urban Sales has closed deals on the promising debut feature to Italy (Tucker Film), China (Dddream), Benelux (September Films), Taiwan (Sky Digi) and Singapore (Lighthouse Film Distribution).

Happinet will handle the Japanese release of “Plan 75” in mid-June. Eurozoom will distribute it in France in the fall. “Plan 75” was produced by Loaded Films,...

Urban Sales has nabbed world rights to “Hug Me – The Movie,” an English-language animated feature directed by Anna Błaszczyk. The pre-school movie is produced by Animoon, the Polish company behind “Even Mice belong in Heaven.”

Urban Sales, the Paris-based banner previously known as Urban Distribution International, will host the market premiere of the movie at Cannes’ Marché du Film.

An eco-friendly tale, “Hug Me” follows the adventures of a bear cub and his papa bear as they search for honey to prepare a birthday cake for the little one. With the den’s honey reserves and surrounding hives running out, Teddy convinces papa bear sets off to find the Golden Land which is believed to harbor an endless source of honey. “Hug Me – The Movie” is co-produced by the Polish outfit FixaFilm and Chinese company Animex, with the support of the Polish Film Institute.

The film marks the feature debut of Błaszczyk,...

Twenty titles have been selected for its main feature competitions.

The Annecy International Animation Film Festival has unveiled its main feature competition line-up for the upcoming 2022 edition (June 13-18).

Ten titles have been selected for official competition, including Eric Warin and Tahir Rana’s Charlotte which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2021. Based on the true story of the young Judeo-German artist Charlotte Salomon, the voice cast includes Kiera Knightley, Marion Cotillard, Sam Claflin and Helen McCrory.

Scroll down for the full list of titles

Other titles include Japanese filmmaker Shinya Kawastura’s The House Of The Lost...

Rémi Chayé’s “Fleur,” Claude Barras’ “You’re Not the One I Expected” and Alberto Vázquez’s “Unicorn Wars” are some of the multiple potential standouts at the 24th edition of Cartoon Movie, Europe’s leading animated movie co-production event.

Scheduled to take place in Bordeaux, France, over March 8-10, the 2022 Cartoon Movie lineup features 57 projects, 15 hail from France, which is seven fewer than last year as animation grows in the rest of Europe but still marks its predominance in Europe as a producer of arthouse and crossover animated movies.

For the third year running, Spain has the second largest presence at Cartoon Movie with eight titles, a sign of its build as a significant animation producer and host of animation events such as Cartoon Springboard, confirmed last week, Cartoon Business and the Quirino Awards.

“You’re Not the One I Expected” marks the new project from Switzerland’s Claude Barras,...

France’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the leading global get-together for all things animation, has unveiled the lineup for this year’s Work in Progress section, among the most highly anticipated events of the world’s animation calendar. When a physical event is possible, lines begin to form early in the morning as fans of the high-profile projects hope to get into the limited seating available at the Salle Pierre Lamy.

A barometer for future standout awards and/or box office success, recent high-profile projects featured at Annecy’s Work in Progress include Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Oscar-winner “Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse” and Oscar nominees in Netflix’s “Klaus” and “Over the Moon,” Cartoon Saloon’s “Wolfwalkers,” Claude Barras’ “My Life as a Zucchini,” Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar’s “Ernest & Celestine,” Michael Dudok de Wit’s “The Red Turtle” and Dean DeBlois’ “How to Train Your Dragon 2.

This article was produced as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring journalists at the Locarno Film Festival, a collaboration between the Locarno Film Festival, IndieWire and the Film Society of Lincoln Center with the support of Film Comment and the Swiss Alliance of Film Journalists.

Audiences at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival got used to hearing a familiar statement: “I just saw a Portuguese film.” They were hard to ignore. Fourteen films of some 200 in the lineup were directed or produced by Portuguese people and were distributed across different sections of the festivals. Viewed together, they have a lot to say about the state of a country’s cinema and its ability to wrestle with broad historical concerns.

These included the so-called “blasphemous” biopic of a Lisbon patron saint in João Pedro Rodrigues’ “The Ornithologist” and “Correspondences,” directed by Rita Azevedo Gomes, which focuses on a letter...