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canmom · 11 months

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L’Aventure de Canmom à Annecy - Dimanche/Lundi

Bonsoir mes amis!

I am in Annecy, the unreasonably picturesque home of the Annecy International Animated Film Festival! I have discovered that the Annecy International Animated Film Festival involves a lot more standing in long queues in the hot sun than I expected! Nevertheless, I’m here and making the best of it.

So.

dimanche - le voyage à annecy

First of all, Sunday! I set off at 3am on Sunday morning, taking a bus, followed by two tubes, followed by another bus to the airport. The last bus was late. I met a couple of nice PhD students on their way to the same airport, and they were gonna get all of us an uber, but then the bus showed up after all.

At the airport, security threw away my 200ml bottle of sunblock. Can never be too careful I guess >< Inevitably, Richard Dawkins and his little pot of honey leapt unbidden into my brain. I promise I did not call anyone a “dundridge”.

The flight itself was uneventful! I was behind three other Annecy-goers, a very sweet gay couple and their friend... we hit it off pretty well but they were on a later bus and I haven’t seen them since I got here ^^’ Once I landed in Geneva I was racing across the city to try to get to the Annecy bus in time (I left myself an hour, which turned out to be way too little time to get through customs, out the airport, onto the train etc.) Trains in Switzerland are nuts, some of them are split across multiple levels and even the ones that aren’t have like, steep steps to get aboard.

Like “fuck you if you’re in a wheelchair” I guess.

Luckily the bus to Annecy was late! So by midday on Sunday I was in Annecy!

I ran into a group of Swiss animation students who were happy to let me tag along for a while. They just finished their graduation films and they were terribly excited about Spider-Verse. They ended up arranging to meet a couple of animators at Cartoon Saloon so I ended up witnessing some honest to god Networking. The imposter syndrome kicked in about when they were showing the cartoon saloon animators clips from their demo reels. I didn’t even have business cards. Apparently that’s a thing people bring???

pictured: swiss animation students approaching Lake Annecy.

Anyway my legs got really tired from standing up and no sleep. I bought myself an expensive crêpe and sat down on the floor to eat it. No films were due to start for hours.

I went down to a comic book shop in Bonlieu. French comic book shops are fucking insane. All the books are enormous glossy hardbacks that cost like 50+ euros. I could totally walk away with the complete works of Moebius or Enki Bilal if things like ‘money’ and ‘getting through the airport’ and ‘not reading French’ weren’t factors. But equally there’s so much stuff that I’ve just plain never heard of. I could spend a month in this one shop easy.

At 3am my hotel checkin opened! Though in French you don’t say ‘check in’, you say j’ai un reservation. By this point I had been awake for more than 24 hours so I decided to go have a nap and eat the falafels I brought with me (very good idea, would recommend having a snack) and wake up for the opening ceremony.

Hotel comments: It’s pretty comfy! Nothing super fancy but I don’t need super fancy. The breakfast is kind of crazy expensive. I had a bit of a scare when it turned out that they hadn’t charged me when I booked the room, and wanted payment now, but thankfully I have a job now so I could take that in stride ^^’

At this point I discovered my plug adapter supports the US, Australia, New Zealand and Japan... but not Europe. Fortunately I had a power bank with me so I could keep my phone alive (its battery is pretty shot) so I resolved to buy a new adapter on Monday.

I woke up shortly before the opening ceremony and quickly concluded that there was no way I was going to be making it down to the opening ceremony and went back to sleep. I slept a really long time. But I think I needed it. Shame to miss the ceremony but odds are I probably wouldn’t have even been able to get in, someone else said she’d queued for two hours.

lundi - les files d'attente

(lmao is that really the french for ‘queues’? ‘files d’attente’?)

A beautiful morning in Annecy! I walked over to the supermarché and got myself some pasta ingredients and a ‘veggie dog’ (falafels in a baguette) from a French bakery. I learned just how limited my French vocab is. But it’s a little reassuring to find French people who speak about as much English as I speak French. (Have not yet tried to speak Japanese to any French person but it will probably happen.)

Anyway. Films time, at last!

So the way Annecy works is, you get a certain number of reservations per day depending on your ticket type. If you don’t have a reservation you can optimistically show up at the theatre anyway, and whatever seats they have left go to the line. From the website it sounded like you’d have a pretty good chance to get in.

My friends. That is a lie.

To get in to a popular non-reserved screening you have to turn up basically hours in advance. Otherwise you arrive at the back of a queue like this, stand in line for a while, and then someone in a red shirt comes out and tells you you’re too late and you go find something else to do.

I have already become very familiar with this particular stretch of ground outside Cinema Pathé. That said, the queues are a good chance to meet people! So I ended up making a couple of connections, mostly with animation students from various places. It turns out a ‘Grand Public’ ticket is a bit of an odd duck.

As you can see in that picture, a lot of people had umbrellas. This is something I neglected, and had to use my bag instead, like so:

Guess where I got sunburned.

One of those something elses I did was walk into the VR films room. This runs on its own reservation system, with each film having somewhere between 2 and 6 headsets, which get sanitised between viewings. The whole room looks kinda scifi with its cables dangling from the ceiling...

The only VR film available when I arrived was called Black Hole Museum + Body Browser by Su Wen-Chi from Taiwan. This was very demoscene, with a lot of particles flying around under force fields in a black and white space; the second part involved a dancer who’d been photoscanned somehow and was displayed using waves of particles. It was neat, but I can’t say I was hugely moved? The display device was a Quest 2, but I’m not sure if it was running the particle sim on Quest 2 hardware. If it was, I’m impressed.

The other VR films were all but fully booked so I resolved to come back another day.

I tried to get into the anime film The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes. Predictably, I was too late. However, the next queue over was for a Spanish film called Inspector Sun and the Curse of the Black Widow, and, wanting to see at least one film I hopped onto that queue and found myself inside the cinema in short order.

The auditorium was packed and I got to witness firsthand such Annecy traditions as throwing paper aeroplanes at the screen, shouting ‘Lapin!’ whenever a rabbit appears onscreen, and making a weird popping sound with your mouth while waiting for the film to start (??? it sounded like frogs ig???). The movie itself was greeted with excitement but honestly? It was pretty eh, which is a shame since the idea of a world of bugs is a fun one! The story concerns a bumbling spider detective, his aspiring sidekick spider, and his feud with the leader of a locust underworld, playing out on a seaplane en route to San Francisco. The characters are all very one-note archetypes, and the dialogue felt like it was trying way too hard to be funny quippy movie dialogue... only to land on the painfully obvious. A big shame.

But what’s worse is that I had spent my one daily reservation on Mars Express by Jérémie Périn at 4:30 and I’d completely lost track of time. By the time I walked out of Inspector Sun my phone was almost dead (see above about the adapter) so I popped into a French electronics store and bought a couple of EU adapters and set off to charge my phone. But then on the bus I thought, hold on a minute, when is Mars Express, I have like an hour right---oh fuck. Well fine it’s at Bonlieu right? I can just walk there? ...it’s at Le Mikado Novel? Where the fuck is that? Half an hour away?

...so to make a long story short I got off the bus, walked down the street, my phone died, there was no way I could find my way to Le Mikado in time to get in even with my reservation, so I had to go back to my hotel and waste my precious reservation. And I hear the film was great. Sob.

There are a bunch of other screenings this week but they’re all packed so who knows if I’ll get to see this movie.

Despite this big oof I charged up my phone and headed back to meet up with my friend (hi to my friend!) who was in the queue for Production I.G.’s new film The Concierge. My friend was more than an hour early, so we thought we had a pretty good chance... lol nope. After standing in line for 45 minutes we were informed the cinema is full and had to leave.

It wasn’t a complete waste though. We met up with another friend and had a little picnic of bagels. Unfortunately the bagel I got was not the bagel I thought I was getting (idk what happened) but even so, it was nice to meet two online friends who by bizarre coincidence both turned out to be from Singapore.

To close the night I decided to take one more shot at getting in to see a movie, and went for a late showing of The Sacred Cave, a movie from Cameroon. Which is pretty neat, it’s not every day you see a movie from Cameroon. This one was... well, technically it’s definitely rough, but I don’t wanna be hard on it. The story is a fairy tale: a traditional healer is called in to attempt to save a dying king, and he dispatches his son on a mission to retrieve special medicine alongside the Prince.

On the way the son encounters a weird forest wizard, then a princess of a neighbouring clan who’s been turned into an anthro frog by an evil wizard; as he tries to head back with the medicine, he’s captured by said clan and almost executed, but because of his pure nature he alone can draw the special magic sword, and using this power he helps his captors overcome the evil wizard’s raiding party. But on the way home he gets betrayed by the Prince! A whole lot of betraying unfolds, killing off the old seer, and it turns out that our boy is actually the true son of the King. Despite the whole ‘executing his adoptive father on spurious charges’ thing, it all shakes out; the baddies are driven off, the princess unfrogged, and our very special good boy is rewarded.

It’s animated largely in Flash, and it has the feel of an online Flash video. All the same, I believe this is the first feature-length animated film from Cameroon. Bootstrapping an animation industry capable of putting together a coherent film is a hell of a feat, and must take an enormous degree of passion and dedication to make that happen. (Also not to put too fine a point on it but there are certain historical reasons why France has a much more developed animation industry than the country it had colonised until 1971.) Anyway, although principally made in Cameroon, the credits name a whole bunch of different countries, mostly in West Africa. Probably it would make sense to compare it to Princess Iron Fan or something like that, and I’m excited to see what comes down the line. And it was a very sincere movie, the setting presented with a great deal of love, especially when it came to costumes. I’m glad to have seen it.

Tomorrow morning Im gonna get up very early and take another shot at The Concierge, and try and plan better around the queuing system to try to make the best of it and catch more of the short films. It’s definitely not been the day of back to back films I was expecting, but honestly despite all that I’m having a good time just being in Annecy and the week is yet young...

good god is it expensive here though

#annecy #annecy film festival #animation #film #l'aventure de canmom à annecy

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canmom · 10 months

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L'aventure de Canmom à Annecy - Vendredi 2: The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes

It's almost a week since the day now but here's more Annecy writeups! I will be republishing this whole series in a very fancy filterable way on canmom.art soon, so look out for that!

Friday's second act was the new anime film The Tunnel to Summer, The Exit of Goodbyes (夏へのトンネル、さよならの出口 Natsu he Tonneru, Sayonara no Deguchi), a title which conveniently only uses kanji from the first ~10 levels of Wanikani so it's nice and easy to read. That said, this showing had both English and French subtitles, so I didn't need to lean on my Japanese knowledge this time. Here's a trailer...

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This film seems to have been out in Japan for long enough that it's already available on nyaa (GJM are working on a sub), but this was actually my first time hearing about it. It was originally a light novel by Mei Hachimoku, then a manga, and now an anime film by Tomohisa Taguchi.

Taguchi has a pretty good track record as a director, although mostly stuff I've not seen. In fact the only of his works I've seen before is the original series Akudama Drive (2020), which is a very stylish scifi heist anime. He also directed the recent Bleach film, and the 2017 Kino's Journey TV anime, as well as a number of adaptations of the Persona games.

As seems to be customary for screenings at the Bonlieu Grand Salle, he and one of the producers (I regret that I didn't make a note of which of the three) came on stage before the film to comment a little. [That guy on the left - I'm not sure his name but he seems to be one of the main people running Annecy, since he introduced most of the films and carried out interviews at most of the Grand Salle screenings I went to.]

Taguchi remarked that most of his previous work has been action, so this more grounded romance film was a big change of pace. He spoke about wanting to capture the loneliness of the two main characters. The animation was carried out at Studio CLAP, a young studio whose previous work is Pompo the Cinephile, which we watched on Animation Night 123.

This film actually ended up winning the 'Paul Grimault Award', one of the three awards bestowed to feature films, which is named after a French animator who I presently mostly know from the bus stop by Cinema Pathé; at some point I gotta dig in more lmao.

So, with all that introduction... what sort of film was it? I went in expecting a solidly made summer movie in the Makoto Shinkai idiom... and that is indeed precisely what I got.

The story concerns two highschoolers, Kaoru (our main viewpoint character) and Anzu. Kaoru is a boy whose sister died when he was young, leading to his parents breaking up and his father falling into alcoholism. Since she was attempting to retrieve a beetle for him, he blames himself for the death - a sentiment shared by his father. Anzu meanwhile is a new transfer student who arrives at the school and immediately makes waves by acting standoffish towards the other students. She has aspirations to become a mangaka, following in the footsteps of her grandfather, but this has estranged her from the rest of her family who disapproved of his lack of success. So she severely doubts her own talent.

The pair meet on a rainy day waiting for a train that is delayed by hitting a deer, at which Kaoru lends Anzu his umbrella. This train stop becomes a recurring motif throughout the film, symbolising the evolution of their relationship. The other major element is a local legend of the 'Urashima Tunnel', which can grant wishes, at the price that time is drastically slowed down inside the tunnel, so that seconds inside the tunnel pass as hours outside. Kaoru discovers the tunnel is in fact real, and might give him a way to save his sister; Anzu follows him and the pair start researching the properties of the tunnel (e.g. its effect on phone communications), and draw up a plan to enter it and get what they want, even if it sends them thousands of years into the future.

Naturally they grow closer together and start to form a romantic relationship. Kaoru learns about Anzu's manga, and comes to the conclusion that she doesn't lack talent at all - and he also knows (somehow) that the tunnel is not capable of bestowing talent, only restoring things that were lost. So in the end (spoilers!) Kaoru enters the tunnel in secret without Anzu knowing. Eight years pass on the outside during which Anzu becomes a successful mangaka, still eaten by her highschool relationship; inside over a matter of minutes Kaoru finds his sister, and spends a little time with her, before realising that actually what he really needs is to be with Anzu, so he texts her and starts running back. They reunite near the entrance of the tunnel, smooch, and live happily ever after (even though Kaoru is still a high schooler and there's an eight year age gap lmao, this just straight up isn't even mentioned as a potential issue).

Generally I enjoyed the buildup a lot more than the final act. That this kind of movie centres on a heterosexual relationship is inevitable, but Anzu and Kaoru's hesitant relationship is genuine and sweet - the scene where Kaoru is reading Anzu's manga as she anxiously waits for his opinion is especially well observed. The pair's efforts, led by Anzu, to analyse the properties of the tunnel through experimentation is fun, since that's precisely what I would do if confronted with a magical tunnel of time dilation. That said, the central fantastical conceit, the time dilation tunnel, doesn't feel like an especially interesting metaphor.

Compared to the films of Makoto Shinkai, which visually and narratively it hews very close to (complete with the coloured highlights), the notable divergence is that the couple don't end up separated and do get their happy ending. Kaoru's decision to break their compact and leave Anzu alone outside the tunnel for eight years ultimately... just doesn't matter too much. He realises he needs to move on, says goodbye to his sister, and reunites with Anzu. I think it might be more interesting if Anzu actually ended up moving on and starting a different relationship and Kaoru had to face up to the fact that he has thrown away his one connection, but then I'm a miserable bitch who loves suffering lmao. Alternatively, I think it would be really cool if they actually did send themselves thousands of years into the future, although it would put this film into a very different genre.

In any case, the ending to this film ultimately left me a little cold. Yay, breeding pair got together.

Even so, it was absolutely an entertaining film; the environments are suitably beautiful, the animation is solid. Whether you'd enjoy it will probably depend how much you enjoy the "summer movie magical romance" subgenre. If you like Makoto Shinkai's movies, you'll probably like this one. If you hate Makoto Shinkai's movies, I expect you'd feel much the same about this one.

Speaking of Makoto Shinkai, I was a little surprised not to see Suzume in competition. But in general it seems pretty random which anime studios decide to submit their work to Annecy. Some studios like Science Saru have a pretty close relationship with the festival, others seem to ignore it entirely. (Perhaps it is a case of like, for smaller studios it's a valuable chance for promotion, but Makoto Shinkai is basically guaranteed a massive worldwide audience so he doesn't need to bother to come out to France?)

#l'aventure de canmom à annecy #film #anime #the tunnel to summer the exit of goodbyes #animation #annecy festival #annecy #Youtube

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canmom · 11 months

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L'Aventur de Canmom à Annecy - Mercredi 4: WTF 2023

WTF (read 'what the fuck' in a heavy French accent) seems to be a kind of annual collection of weird online shit. Titmouse is involved in some capacity, although I don't think they're necessarily the ones who picked the films. And while I did recognise one selection (umami had a film) most of it was new to me and there were some crazy good ones...

... but most of all the atmosphere of the late night screening was amazing. I got in at the last minute and somehow ended up in a reserved seat for Titmouse, since I guess they didn't show? Which meant I had one of the best views in the house. The theatre was completely packed and full of excitement.

So then this guy comes out in the skintight purple vest and cape and rainbow stockings. The boss of Titmouse comes on stage and picked up one of the paper planes to invite whoever threw it to come and bite a balloon in half (which would have been a better bit if the person actually did it).

Then came the directors of the films, mostly to tell jokes ("there's too much business and not enough fucking at Annecy" declared one director, instructing us to have sex tonight). After these guys... some Gobelins instructors came out to throw shirts into the crowd, people went absolutely nuts for these shirts. Then: films.

Actually a bunch of these are available online so... here, watch along x3

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To open we had this stop motion earworm, Du vélo à St-Malo, du kayak à St-Briac. By the second chorus, the audience was singing along. The images are a bit lolrandom but I can't deny it's infectious in its editing.

Next up came the debut of David by Patrick Ward, about a seriously injured footballer confronting his rival framed through the story of David and Goliath. Lots of little visual jokes that made it flow even if the overall thrust of the story remained a little opaque to me.

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Umami's Safe Mode was a natural fit; if you've seen an Umami film you know what to expect. Surreal character designs and a guy with a monotone voice. Looking forward to more of this series.

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The Rubbings of Trajectories by Cheng-Hsu Chung from Taiwan took things in a rather Adventure Time direction in its drawing style, full of wild perspective shifts and morphing. I was a little too caught up in the visuals to take a lot from the voiceover lol.

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Insomnie by Paul Utkay leaned on Stable Diffusion interpolation for its surreal shifting visuals. This was I think the only time, besides the one after this, I've seen AI in the festival, and right now the main use of AI seems to be like this, a visual effect.

Following this came Two Gracious Uncles Smooched To The Beat (currently password locked so I can't embed it) by Jon Dunleavy, a completely frenetic sendup of the whole AI art 事件. Rather than being made by AI it's mostly deliberately janky cgi, rapidfire jokes, and wrong subtitles as an extra layer, which made for a fun watch. The thesis was maybe something like, "this is all a bit silly". As a programming move, putting this right after the AI film was kind of genius.

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A Kind of Testament by Stephen Vuillemin was simply fantastic, absolutely the highlight of this collection. The framing device is that a woman stumbles on a website created by another older woman with the same name as her, consisting of incredibly elaborate animations based on her social media photos. As we watch more, we learn more about this mysterious animator, who died shortly after the protagonist contacted her. Ultimately though this framing device is just a vehicle for some really tight imaginatively grotesque shorts that gradually start to connect up more and more. I hesitate to call it ero-guro because it's not exactly ero, but it definitely put me in mind of e.g. shintaro kago. the framing device works just right, linking the shorts and providing a certain frame for interpretation - the animator is terminally ill, so jokes about foot killing parasites and regrets make sense - without being overbearing. honestly just a really great film, the perfect level of enigmatic. i hope i can show more than the trailer some day.

Internet Gaga by Reinhild Bidner slammed into a much faster pace, a pastiche of Radio Gaga by Queen with the music video consisting mainly of cutout animation and AI deepfake animation of memes. Two minutes was about the right length for this lol. But yeah, haha, the internet, what a mess amirite

Todo está perdido by Carla Pereira Docampo and Juan Francisco Jacinto Prados was a fascinating oddity though. Stop motion, with these wildly distorted models - built in forwards or backwards slants and birdlike eyes. The story concerns a suburban nuclear family where the mother lays eggs, which they mostly eat, but decide to fertilise one one day, resulting in a baby with a wrinkled head hatching. The B plot concerns their other child who gets a rat inside her skin by accident during surgery. As you can imagine it went for the squick reactions. I can't find an online video of this one but here's a previous project by the same directors.

From this point on things got pretty wild. First up we had Uncle Babysitter 2 by Tung Yin Ng aka Tungwood.

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as far as toilet humour goes? This was actually great, just relentless gleeful escalation. I got to chat a bit with Tungwood and his friends after the films, and funnily enough he was very shy and would run up to people saying 'souvenir' and give them a card for the film. It was very funny talking to a group of animators, which in my eyes is like the peak of the world's professions, and have them act impressed when i say I'm a game dev.

Anyway, this was a really fun short about a baby's adventure inside a man's stomach as the man desperately tries to pull him out. The breakneck editing really makes the stupid jokes work, it's kinda Imaishi in that way.

Granny X by DD Sheahan relaxed the pace only barely, telling the story of an old lady in a nursing home having a vivid lesbian fantasy that in the waking world leads to her careening around strangling nurses and stuff. It was fun visually, although the humour seemed generally a little meaner.

Monsterfuckers by the Tohu Animation Collective led by Ori Goldberg was something like a multi animator project with loops contributed by different animators around the vague prompt of monsters having sex. So this one's like, straight up porn but weird porn so it gets to be in here lol. The editing to the music was tight and many of the clips were really creative - but no sign of it online as yet so I can't show you.

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We were really on a roll at this point. The final part was the music video for Cool Party by Simon Medard for a band called Cocaine Piss, which pushed the jank factor to maximum. It didn't do a lot for me but it kept the energy going. After that we spilled out onto the lawn outside Bonlieu and everyone gathered in small groups. Not really wanting to just walk away, I inserted myself into conversations here and there, said some nice things to the showrunner, met Tungwood... and then at last time to go home, packed on the last bus like sardines.

Honestly, even if it could have been a little weirder to be truly 'what the fuck', this event was a blast. I mean you know how much I like this kind of thing lmao.

As for Thursday... haha god it's 2am. I'll write about it tomorrow... or maybe on Saturday... but the very short version is that I saw Art College 1994 (solid, donghua with a realist style and richard linklater energy), Kensuke's Kingdom (impressively elaborate adaptation of a Michael Morpurgo story, had a bit of an Iron Giant feel visually), White Plastic Sky (a very compelling scifi dystopian drama from Hungary in a rotoscoped style similar to A Scanner Darkly), stood in line for two hours for Mars Express and still didn't get in, watched a bit of Perspectives block 1 (mostly bad, it's the block for serious social issues rather than compelling storytelling) and then tried Graduation Films 3 (sadly could not live up to Graduation Films 2). So a bit of an unfortunate end to the day but that's how it be sometimes...

Tomorrow I've got another packed day so I'm gonna end up really behind on these writeups but stand by lol. Annecy is amazing, I don't want it to end...

#Youtube #Vimeo #l'aventure de canmom à annecy #annecy film festival #annecy #animation

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canmom · 11 months

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L'Aventur de Canmom à Annecy - Mercredi 3: The First Slam Dunk

so this is a movie I've wanted to see ever since I saw the trailer.

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before that I had never once heard of Slam Dunk, which is a wildly popular and long-running manga series about a delinquent who becomes devoted to basketball, which - in contrast to say Kuroko no Basket - seems to have very little profile in the west. but the visuals of this trailer just blew me away. I didn't even realise it was mostly CG and not just unbelievably tight drawings at first. this film is one of the best uses of nonphotorealistic CG I've ever seen; it absolutely captures the feeling of a manga panel coloured in watercolour. but even more so in motion, the choreography manages to perfectly blend the clarity of manga paneling with naturalistic sports movement. I know basically nothing about basketball, but the animation was so clear that it felt like I could read every move.

so what's this movie about, besides basketball? the structure of the movie is to interleave a movie length basketball game with the backstory of the players, primarily our main boy Ryota, whose family is dealing with the death of Ryota's star basketballer older brother. But all five members of the main team and even the main antagonist player get their own arcs.

And this basketball game - despite knowing how sports movies work, that was so fucking tense. The ebb and flow of points and movement, the tension of each shot, the emotions of the team - I feel like by the end of the movie we've probably seen nearly every possible permutation of basketball events, and yet it never drags. In the final moments I could swear everyone in the theatre was holding their breath. I finally feel it, why people watch sports, instead of it just being something I understand in the abstract.

And to return to the animation, it's honestly incredible - I can only assume they used a method similar to Studio Orange combining 2D choreography and 3D, because the timing, the play of speedup and slowdown and direction of attention, is so on point; somehow it feels like the most realist animation of basketball I've seen and also incredibly manga, with many shots that are clearly splash panels, and even eventually devices like speed lines. The CG - which blends so well that when I saw shots that were probably drawings, I still wasn't sure! - never feels awkward or uncanny, indeed often it's easy to forget it even is CG at all, and I'm dying to know how their shading model works. The lines never look like they're drawn onto a model or display the awkwardness of an inverted hull. I keep coming back to this but it truly feels like seeing a really detailed manga in motion.

It turned out this screening had French subs, and my Japanese vocab is too poor to pick up a lot of the dialogue. So it's a credit to the animation, the acting, that I could still get so invested lmao

So The First Slam Dunk this delivered and then some. I cannot wait for the BDs to come out so I can run this on Animation Night.

#l'aventure de canmom à annecy #the first slam dunk #anime #animation #i can't believe i'm this hype about a basketball manga #Youtube

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canmom · 11 months

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L’aventure de Canmom à Annecy - Mardi

or, the real Annecy starts here.

Tuesday was nuts! I saw so much stuff. I have cracked the code.

So, if you wanna know what Annecy is like, I can’t possibly present it better than La Cachette, who made this sponsor intro that plays before every movie...

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Imagine everyone shouts “lapin!!!” when the rabbit appears and also when the rabbit gets eaten by the T. rex. But yeah: the sudden rainfall, the paper planes flying around, pop pop pop.

Anyway, Tuesday was crazy, I saw so many great movies, with some real surprises too! I wrote about them all below~

It’s interesting to think about like. Annecy traditions are this sort of free floating wave. The cohort of people who go to Annecy each year is constantly rotating (as different students graduate etc.) but there’s enough overlap to pass on these traditions, much like at schools with the ‘cool S’ and paper fortune tellers and other parts of, you could say, ‘child culture’.

Anyway, the day began with an expensive hotel breakfast (food is so expensive in Annecy) followed by queuing up for another crack at The Concierge...

Despite arriving around 2 hours early, we never stood a chance. Also it started raining. I did nevertheless manage to draw the queue in front of me, but it was very rough.

Failing to get in to that, my friend decided to queue for Lonely Castle in the Mirror while I went off to the VR hall again to make some early registrations. This time I watched I Took A Lethal Dose of Herbs by Yvette Granata from the USA.

This one was made in Unity (I could tell because it didn’t load properly at first and I was clipped into the floor and saw the default Unity skybox lmao) running on a Quest 2 via Quest Link. It puts you in the body of an anti-abortion activist who goes through post-partum psychosis and then, becoming pregnant again, attempts suicide, before finally accepting an abortion.

The presentation is essentially a non-interactive VR horror game. At one point your legs get eaten by hallucinations of demon babies; another part sees a room gradually transform into a deep-dreamed variant. As a horror film, it was kinda neat. The credits announced “based on a true Reddit story” which kind of knocked me flat lmao. It was entertaining, but I don’t think it really hit the impact intended.

After that, with bookings locked in for two more VR films, I scooted back to join my friend in the queue for Lonely Castle in the Mirror directed by Keiichi Hara, who I wrote about a bit back on Animation Night 137. This time Hara has A1 Pictures rather than mighty Production I.G. behind him, but it’s still absolutely a nicely drawn movie; the composite is more restrained than the above image might make you think.

This turned out to be a screening with only French subtitles, so I got some unexpected Japanese listening practice. I definitely didn’t pick up every detail, but between the visuals, the Japanese audio and the subs I was pretty much able to follow the plot. And a good plot it was! An assortment of teenagers are transported each month through mirrors into a mysterious castle, overseen by a girl in a wolf mask, which provides them all a refuge from their various difficulties at home.

Our viewpoint character is a shy girl who has gone hikikomori after bullying by a group of schoolgirls, and is hurting from the lost connection to another girl. As the story unfolds, we learn more about what happened to her and the other characters; meanwhile the kids hang out in the castle, gradually forming connections.

The castle is like... well diegetically there’s no question it exists, but it’s the kind of magical thing that reflects the character’s emotional struggle. The climax of the film involves a wolf stalking the castle and devouring the children, which is basically a suicide metaphor, and Kokoro going into the castle to attempt to save everyone.

Even with French subs, I ended up enjoying this movie a lot.

Following this my brother came into town on his way to Portugal for a family holiday next week. I met up with him and we had some tasty noodles. We split up again, him going to check out some of the old buildings of Annecy, me going back to the VR room...

where I discovered that if an Annecy juror shows up to watch a VR film, your slot gets cancelled, so I didn’t get to see From The Main Square. But I did get to see Shadow by David Adler and Ole Bornedal from Denmark and the UK.

This one turned out to be really fucking good. It’s an incredibly intense semi-interactive movie in which you play the part of a bomber navigator on a morning raid. Your job is to confirm the target so the pilot can blow it up, but with the fog, the sea, the movement of the plane and battle outside, it’s a lot easier said than done.

This film does a fantastic job of building tension in the runup to the attack. The interactions between your character and the pilot are acted very well, and the sea and mist outside - rendered in Unreal - is properly sketchy to fly through. You confirm the target by using head tracking to look at a yes/no input, and I was fully caught up in trying to make sure we hit the right building and didn’t get shot. Such a tense film, and honestly kind of a vindication of the VR format. I hope there’s something else as good in there.

Following this I scooted over to see the short films collection 4. This turned out to be a great choice: there were very few misses and a lot of plain great films. Also I guess this was like where they put all the gore and nudity lmao, but who knows, I’ll have to see other short film selections.

Haljina za finale dir. Martina Mestrovic presented a sweet picture of the day in an old lady’s life, in which she dyes her dress black and reminisces about the past.

Salvation Has No Name dir. Joseph Wallace was a really cool stop-motion film, making really creative use of old woodcuts along with its puppets, about a refugee who washes up on the shore of a paranoid village and a prevaricating priest who tries to protect her, tries to have sex with her, and takes her newborn child and pushes her away; it’s all presented by a circus troupe who are also the villagers attempting to cover their ass for what they did. There’s some really neat devices of presentation - e.g. the refugee woman speaks English same as the villagers, but diegetically they’re speaking different languages. The metaphors are pretty on the nose, but it’s really nicely shot and tense.

L’Ombre des Papillons dir. Sofia El Khyari is a more abstract one, a very beautifully painted erotic dream with a lot of morphing and transformations (particularly things turning into butterflies). Really nice use of texture in this one.

Wild Summon dir. Saul Freed and Karni Arieli is where things got really nuts. This is like. The most photorealistic hard vore guro film I’ve ever seen lmao. So like the idea is it’s like, a nature documentary on the life cycle of salmon, with all the beautiful shots of landscapes and rivers you’d expect, but with the twist that all the salmon are anthropomorphised to humans in wetsuits and masks (as you see above). These anthro salmon then die horribly in all the ways salmon tend to, at the hands of both animals and humans.

Our main character is a salmon who gets tagged with a tracker by some scientists; this allows her to be thrown back in the water when caught by a fishing trawler for example. The voiceover is by Marianne Faithfull doing an effective old posh british lady voice (I sorta wondered if it was Judy Dench). If this was an actual nature documentary it would be a really beautiful one, but the anthro thing adds an amazing surreal edge.

This one was filmed in the UK, and it’s definitely leaning on the big VFX industry we have over here. Absolutely fascinating film honestly.

I’m Hip, solo animated by American John Musker and comped/edited by Talin Tanielian, was also a delight. Just four minutes of really strong lively traditional animation as a cat sings a self-aggrandising song before getting chased out of town; old-school in a good way.

Daug Geresnis dir. Skirmanta Jakait was the one that lost me, though I imagine if I saw it with English subs I might get more out of it (I saw it in Lithuanian with French subs). I really like the visual style, but the film was a sort of incomprehensible chain of surreal images and I didn’t really know how to put them together.

Drijf dir. Levi Stoops from Belgium wrapped up this collection. This one leans hard on the grossout humour - I’d compare it to something like Savage Death Valley or to a certain extent Lloyd’s Lunchbox. A man and woman are stranded on a calm sea, rowing around on a log, suffering a series of increasingly awful injuries in their misadventures. It’s definitely a ‘bodies, fucked up right?’ sorta movie, and it was a fun bit of black humour, hearing the audience go ‘ooooh’ when something nasty happens.

I had set my reservation today for ‘The Soldier’s Tale’ but I had planned things out really stupidly and had no time to say goodbye to my brother and see that film. Instead we went round the comic shop I talked about last time. It was good to see him and he seems to be having a good time on his trip across Europe.

Speaking of brothers...

I decided to take a chance on Four Souls of Coyote dir. Áron Gauder. I didn’t know much about this going in, but the brief description on the site made it sound a little preachy, so I didn’t set my hopes too high. I was so wrong, this movie was actually maybe the highlight of the day!

This is a Hungarian movie based on (nonspecifically...) Indigenous stories, with the framing device of the story being told by an old man at the Standing Rock pipeline protests. The bulk of the film is an origin story for the world: Old Man Creator - not the top god in this situation - creates Turtle Island and fills it with creatures. In a dream, he creates Coyote, and mistreats him at once; Coyote, an obligate carnivore in a world that does not yet know death, steals the creation mud and creates humans

So most of the film then tells how, through a series of events, Coyote ends up complicating the idyllic scenario by introducing death into the world, and sexual reproduction, and inspiring the creation of lightning and fire before being betrayed by the humans he created, eaten, and on his final life, driven away. It’s a really interesting sort of mythological schema: even Old Man Creator doesn’t know the why of it all, and there’s this kind of idea that a lot of the way things work happened not by design but by mistake (perhaps according to the ineffable design of , and once something is created it’s irrevocably part of the world, so we just have to make do.

I have no idea what’s based on mythology and what was created by the Hungarians, but what makes this all work is the incredible animation. This is just a really really strong work of traditional animation, with fantastic colour and compositing to boot. It might genuinely be the best looking film I’ve seen this whole festival so far, which is nuts. There are all sorts of characterful touches in every shot, the magic is presented in a really elegantly straightforward way, and the whole story unfolds with a compelling degree of intricacy and tension, setup and payoff.

Coyote, the famous trickster, is certainly the main character of this movie. He’s a fascinating character; arrogant, quick to lie and in love with his own cleverness but also we can see his pride comes from the rough circumstances of his creation, where he’s chewed out by his creator from the get go and everyone pushes him away.

The second act of the story sees Coyote free the imprisoned lightning (who’s like. a kind of dragon creature ig?) and go across the sea, discovering the Europeans, who in this story come from the discarded clay that Coyote used as a first attempt at humans; seeking revenge, Coyote invites the Europeans back to Turtle Island, not realising the level of destruction they will bring, or that they will chain him up and call him a dog. Spending the last of his four lives, Coyote has a final face turn where he tries to save the humans.

There’s a bunch to be said about this movie, and once it gets a release I am dying to show it on Animation Night. Its treatment of gender for example feels a bit too rigid and traditional, with the archetypal Man and Woman as the main human characters. The Europeans are presented as getting their power from enslaving Lightning, which is a neat way to make the story centre on what happens on Turtle Island; however, the parable-like telling kind of ends up feeling a bit too simplified where the Europeans show up and destroyed the single (kinda Plains in visual presentation) Indigenous society with overwhelming military force, which is like... not really how it all played out, but it works for the presentation of this movie, where the invasion is kind of a coda to the main story.

The ending of the movie sees the workers, ordered to bulldoze a mountain for the sake of a pipeline, climb out of their bulldozers and join the protestors, with the CEO lady in charge impotent to stop them. In our more depressing reality reality the cops showed up and drove away the protestors by overwhelming force.

I have this much to say though because the movie was so good. But tbh this is just a British girl’s impression. I really want to get Araña’s opinion on this one.

Not done yet, I went to see the student films, block 2. This turned out to be another amazing time: at the big screen in Bonlieu, even this late, loads of people were there and it was the most Annecy showing yet; so many paper planes flying about. Most of the students who made the films were present in the audience and after each film stood up so we could applaud them.

The films were also really good! There are some crazy talented animation students in this world.

Havnesjefen dir. Mia L. Henriksen, Konrad Hjemli (Norway) told the story of a swan known as the Harbourmaster, known for attacking boats in the Norwegian town of Os, who was put down after he started putting humans at risk. It tried a number of ambitious things with the animation: Roger Rabbit-like compositing into live action backgrounds, and Creature Comforts-like animating characters based on real interviews with random people. The result was rough, but pretty cute and effective.

Ressources humaines dir. Titouan Tiller, Trinidad Plass, Isaac Wenzek (France) was a wonderfully dark stop motion film about a guy going to have his body recycled into a chair. It really plays up the awkward everydayness of the scenario, with the documentary camera wandering around and the cheerful patter of the receptionist; the result was great.

Makulatour dir. Tim Markgraf (Germany) was fascinating: a bunch of fluid motions filmed through a microscope (I think??) edited to music. Absolutely absorbing, I have no idea how he did it.

Deniska umřela dir. Philippe Kastner (Czech Republic) is an autobiographical story about a boy whose dog dies, and how he comes to terms with it through art. It’s got a really nice monochrome textured style that made me think of paint on velvet.

Bottled Insects dir. Yuxin Gao in Japan was where things got really nuts. This is traditional animation but not at all anime, incredibly textured and shaped creatures that sort of make me think Masaaki Yuasa and sort of make me think HYLICS. It portrays a girl who collects weird creatures, building up a massive wall of them in her room; it has an ambiguous mood (the blurb says it’s about her losing her sense of self) but a strong flow and just wild imagery. I loved this one.

Hobune dir. Jass Kaselaan (Estonia) was... I’m not entirely sure what the deal with this one was. Lots of odd military imagery and concrete housing blocks. A horse falls over and gets up. The drawing was very rough and line boil-y. But yeah idk I didn’t get it, it’s another one of those ‘disconnected surreal images’ type of ones.

La Nuit Blanche dir. Audrey Delepoulle was great though. Gorgeous paint-y textures and use of lighting, it shows people desperately trying to preserve their crops with burners as frost closes in. It made me think of Frostpunk, but much more grounded. Really tense and beautiful.

Passagers dir. Celia Hardy from Belgium used a similar technique to The Wolf House, animating by painting onto walls and painting over each previous frame, mixed with stop motion. There wasn’t a lot of narrative but there was definitely a lot of very inventive movement, and in general it was really fun to watch.

Priyo Ami dir. Suchana Saha (India) was an abstract one, heavily textured paint, lots of morphing shapes... I can’t remember a lot of what actually happened in it besides the cunnilingus lol. But it definitely felt very personal and sincere, and I respect putting such a film in front of everyone.

Sewing Love by Yuan Xu (Japan) took the metaphor of a partner filling a void in your life to a very literal sense. A boy meets a girl who fills the gap inside him, but when she leaves, he becomes desperate, and restrains her, eventually physically sewing her inside his body. But inside her body she retreats into a tiny ball where she grows new butterfly wings and eventually hatches out. Big metaphors! But the animation was completely wild, with all sorts of morphing and weird perspectives, I can’t even imagine what the process must have been like. I didn’t like this one as much as Bottled Insects because the metaphor felt a bit overbearing, but I was really impressed by the animation.

My last film of the night was Unique Time dir. Yu-Jin Oh (South Korea). This film was crazy technically good, like you could tell me that Studio Mir made this and I’d believe you. The scifi premise is that there are androids who holographically take on the appearance of someone, used for all sorts of purposes; our main character is an android who develops a glitch causing them to create a unique face and identity. A photographer jumps on this as a chance to become relevant again, and the android’s face is soon plastered all over the city... and inevitably a line of mass produced clones is produced. ‘Jay’ (the name assigned by the photographer) is deeply disturbed to realise they’re still just a product, and gets in a very public fight with the photographer; afterwards, they are factory reset, but the glitch still persists... It’s definitely well within the familiar territory of cyberpunk stories, but the execution carries it - it’s hard to believe this is a student film.

By the time all this was done I had to walk back because the buses had become very infrequent, but damn, so worth it. What an amazing day. It took me more than two hours to write all this up lol, between that and catching up on sleep I’ve missed the whole of Wednesday morning rip.

Time to get out there and see some more films!! Annecy is amazing I really wish I could take you all down here.

#l'aventure de canmom à annecy #annecy film festival #annecy #animation #four souls of coyote

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canmom · 10 months

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L'Aventure de Canmom à Annecy - Vendredi 1: Short Films 5

Olá from Portugal! I am recovered from travelling, and it's time to finish my Annecy writeups...

Friday I ended up waking up pretty late, all those late screenings catching up with me. I spent a while writing up Thursday in my hotel before realising that my computer clock was still on UK time. This meant I missed another chance to fruitlessly queue for Mars Express, I missed the new film Toldi by Marcel Jankovics, and I even missed Graduation Films 1 which contained the eventual winner of the category. So, rip. 仕方がない。。。

I got into Annecy just in time to catch the next block of short films. I elected to go to block 5 at Pathé because afterwards I could scoot into Bonlieu for Tunnel to Summer. More on that in a bit lol. Let's cover short films 5!

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We begin with La saison pourpre by Clémence Bouchereau from France. This one was really neat. It's traditional animation in pencil, depicting a group of people, mostly children, who live naked in the roots of a mangrove. It made great use of partial drawings, just enough to recognise you're looking a character's arm or legs or cunt or whatever, depicting the tense interactions as the nameless characters hunt, play, and find themselves threatened by a storm. The sound design is also really strong. I feel like the nudity works for this film, although I could understand having qualms. The characters' eyes are just dots, and their expressions opaque, but the context and the way the interactions are framed expresses plenty of tension and emotion. I can only guess what motivated this film, but it ended up being really absorbing.

Ce qui bouge est vivant by Noémie Marsily from Belgium was kinda eh to me. A woman's voiceover narrates an existential crisis as we get a series of disconnected images, most of which I struggle to remember now (don't do your writeups four days later lol).

D'une peinture... à l'autre was better than I expected. By this point I saw quite a few films that used a rough oil-painting like effect and a lot of them don't use it very well, but here the paintings - which depict a camera flying around through a painted world establishing (I assume) a context for the two paintings it's about, was solid.

I don't know that I really picked up on the implied contrast between the two paintings, which both depict a reclining naked white woman and a Black woman in two different poses, but I looked them up while writing this post. The first is Olympia by Édouard Manet. Here, the white woman is looking directly at the 'camera' position, and the Black woman is clearly framed as a servant; apparently this painting caused controversy at its time, partly for many symbols that suggest the white woman is a sex worker, partly because she is recognisably a well-known model at the time. The second painting is Le Blanche et la Noire by Félix Vallotton, a response to Olympia; here the Black woman is chilling on the bedside smoking a cigarette instead of trying to present flowers, regarding the sleeping woman on the bed - apparently to suggest the two women are lovers, since this pose would usually be assigned to a man. The animation in the second half progresses in a different direction (right to left rather than left to right) and reframes the scenes from the first half.

I was not familiar with either of these paintings so all I could really do in the moment was appreciate the animation. But tbh I'm kind of glad they didn't put a context card up front because that would make it feel painfully didactic. I wouldn't mind seeing this film again with more of an idea what it's getting at.

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Carne de Dios directed by Patricio Plaza, animated in Mexico and Argentina, was one of the strongest entries in this set. It depicts a priest during the colonial period; at the outset he encounters an indigenous girl running through the field with some mushrooms, which he knocks out of her hand and crushes. But, he falls ill, and finds himself in a church, where an older indigenous healer is preparing to treat him with the same mushrooms. From this point on the film goes full psychedelia; the priest dreams of the statue of Jesus on the cross turns into a giant, who devours him. Inside the guts he finds himself sucking on kaiju!Jesus's nipples and getting fisted by a giant kaiju finger (don't ask why kaiju!Jesus is inside his own stomach). It's strongly presented with traditional animation so if you enjoy ridiculous psychosexual imagery it's a fun one.

The next morning, the priest wakes up after his bad(?) mushroom trip terrified to find the healer seemingly dead; he flees from the area.

The imagery of the priest's dream is interesting, for poking at the weird sort of sex obsession-revulsion in Christianity; it's also better for the film that the priest didn't really Learn A Valuable Lesson or anything. The animation was extremely cool, and I'm definitely immensely curious to see what this team does next.

Love Me True by Inés Sedan from France depicts a woman who gets into online dating, and becomes infatuated with a man who mostly wants to take her to group sex and has very little use for her otherwise. She has a bad time; eventually she turns to other men who treat her as poorly. It's another one that uses rough paint textures and relatively limited animation, set to a voiceover narration. I think I'm coming to feel that voiceovers are a technique that is tricky to use effectively. If they're redundant with the animation, the animation should be allowed to speak for itself.

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27 by Flóra Anna Buda depicts... I think it's a daydream? But essentially a girl in a cramped family situation (her brother catches her masturbating and teases her about it cosntantly) standing at the window and then going out to have a lot of sex. It's got a highly abstracted style where everyone is big old shapes. By this point I was definitely starting to think of short films 5 as the porn block lmao.

Tongue by Yoshida Kaho flashes by in just two minutes. With a very stylised approach to drawing that's basically what they call "corporate memphis", it shows a woman who bites out tiresome mens' tongues and stores them in a box. For feminism, you know. I think it could have stood to be hornier with it, like make the tongue biting really juicy. But that would weaken the metaphor lol.

The final film was Eeva directed by Morten Tšinakov and Lucija Mrzljak from Estonia and Croatia. I needed to scoot out of the theatre early to make sure I could get into Tunnel to Summer, so I didn't see this film. I think it actually got an award so that might have been a mistake if it was really good! The description of it is...

It's pouring down with rain at the funeral. There's a lot of crying, too much wine, several woodpeckers and a couple of dreams that fill in the gaps.

...so make your own guesses as to what kind of film it was.

So, solid collection with a couple of really strong ones. From this point on the day was all anime...

#l'aventure de canmom à annecy #annecy festival #animation #film #annecy #Youtube

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canmom · 10 months

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L'aventure de Canmom à Annecy: Vendredi 3: Kaina of the Great Snow Sea

For Friday I spent my reservation walking right back into Bonlieu Grand Salle, on the premiere of Kaina of the Great Snow Sea: Star Sage. This film was not even out in Japan - I was one of the first people in the world to see it outside the studio that made it! Even though I knew absolutely nothing about the film, I was like, sounds sick, let's go.

It turns out that it's based on a story for TV by the great Tsutomu Nihei (accompanied by a manga, but it seems first conceived as a TV show). I love Nihei's work, but that comes with a wrinkle: this is another adaptation by Polygon Pictures in CGI, the same studio that adapted Blame! as a film and Knights of Sidonia as a TV show. These adaptations are... controversial I suppose, I know people who enjoy them, but I would say generally they are not loved by fans of Nihei's manga. That said, I haven't seen their take on Blame!, and I watched Sidonia so many years ago that I was basically a different person, so I resolved to give them a fair shot.

Also the director and producer came on the stage, both of them holding bottles of beer, and were really fun and energetic, getting us to cheer the film with three segments of the audience going か, い, な (I was in the 'い' group), so in general the energy in the theatre was pretty enthusiastic...

...which means it's truly a shame that the film ended up disappointing.

It turns out Star Sage is actually a sequel film to a TV series that aired in 2022. I did not realise this going in, but it explains a lot: we seem to be starting in the middle of the story, with a lot that happened beforehand. It was easy enough to pick up on the character relationships - most are quite archetypal - but I think it would probably work a lot better on the back of the TV show.

What I really liked about it was the imaginative setting. The 'Snow Sea' only loosely resembles snow; it is akin to a slow-moving fluid, transparent if you sink into it. Floatation is possible only with 'snowfoil sticks' harvested from the animals that live in the snow sea, which are used to create special boats that travel across the surface. There are some cool setpieces with this, such as a huge cliff where the surface of the 'snow' becomes vertical. This whole world is covered by an enormous solid canopy supported by 'orbital spire trees', with city-states built at their bases, surviving on the water that rises up through the trees.

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The main characters of our story are Kaina, your standard heroic boy with the Nihei-standard long fringe, and Ririha, the princess of a certain nation. At the outset of the film, they have defeated a nation of invaders in a war by supernatural (or rather magitech) intervention, and they are now setting sail along with Amelothee, a defector from the invaders, on an expedition to the 'Great Spire Tree' where abundant water might be found.

Their mission successfully gets them to the tree, but there they find a technologically advanced nation led by a dictatorial young man Byōzan who enslaves the expedition. Amelothee and her people seem to defect and side with him. Kaina and Ririha attempt to infiltrate the project, and discover that Byōzan intends to find something called the 'Authorised User's Suit' with which he can order the big ancient robots to cut down the spire trees, believing this will save the world. They're captured; Ririha is taken to Byōzan, who needs her connection to the tech-spirits, while Kaina is sent underground to the mines where the workers are searching for the Authorised User's Suit.

Ririha is introduced to Byōzan's mother, who drops some of his backstory, and underlines that he has totally the wrong idea and is in part running on resentment at not being able to see the spirit anymore. Meanwhile, Kaina is for whatever reason immune to the ghosts guarding the old ruins, and finds the Suit, along with the big reveal: this whole thing is in fact a massive terraforming system, and it's basically finished, it just needs two people to give the instruction to complete terraforming to the spirit/AI governing the project (for some reason).

Kaina emerges with the suit, and the workers stage a rebellion against Byōzan. Amelothee was actually only pretending to defect, but despite everything, Byōzan gets the suit back and commands his robots to cut down the tree, but Kaina manages to climb up after him, rescue Ririha, and save the world. The humans start farming, and ever after is lived happily.

The influence of Nausicaa is very strong, if more so the movie than the manga. For example, we have a fantastical ecosystem (complete with bugs) that is actually a terraforming system; a vague prophecy; Amelothee is basically Kushana; Kaina carries a rifle not so different from Nausicaa's. I love Nausicaa, and I think there is a ton of potential in this film; sadly I just don't feel like it's realised. If I would compare it with anything it's actually a fairly obscure scifi anime film called Gin'iro no Kami no Agito, which has a cool setting of overgrown post-apocalyptic ruins but ultimately falls down to a massive ancient scifi machine that needs to be turned off by the right kind of boy.

So yeah partly this is because, for all the imaginative setting, this is just a standard 'boy saves the world' type of plot. Certain elements, such as the terraforming system requiring a final voice command, feel needlessly contrived. But that said, there's plenty here that I like. And the Nausicaa film is not so different.

So is it the visuals? Maybe. And that's probably worth examining...

I will preface this to say that I absolutely do not believe that is impossible to make good CG anime with present day tech. In fact earlier in the festival I watched The First Slam Dunk which was genuinely one of the best looking animated films I've ever seen. Even without the unique watercolour-like shader tech they used in that film, Studio Orange have been doing cel-shaded CGI like their Houseki no Kuni and that looks great, and from what I've seen of Trigun Stampede, it works pretty well there too.

CG should also be a pretty natural fit for the sort of grand scifi spectacle this film is going for. But it left me cold here. So why?

Partly we can look at technical stuff. For example, there is a lack of cloth and hair physics. One of the things that really sold Slam Dunk's CGI was that the characters' loose clothes swung and folded and generally moved naturally. In contrast, the characters in Kaina in their bulky snow outfits look decent enough in stills, but when they move, they move mostly as rigid dolls.

But also it's the way characters move in general. It is hard to really nail down where the problems lie without watching the film again, but it felt like there is a lack of weight, a lack of real impact, as well as a lack of emotion conveyed by the animated acting. The face rigs seem to be quite limited in how far they can really push their expressions, the body language just as much. And the camera is constantly in motion, too much so - which means that a lot of the tools of framing become unavailable.

Likewise, the lighting and composite tends not to use the powerful negative space and contrast that Nihei's manga is so good at. In this case since it's anime-first there's not a manga to compare with, but this is a setting that truly depends on selling a feeling of vast scale, and it just never quite sold it.

(Also... it's a small complaint but the particle effect used when the boats move through the snow sea, which consists of small spherical balls thrown up, just plain looks so bad, it bothered me so much. Like I don't know how this ever got to be the final effect used - it looks like a placeholder.)

All in all it felt sadly lacking in ambition. It's just too conventional; the setting ends up feeling less interesting for the big reveals. What I really like about manga like Blame! is how vast and bleak they feel; by contrast this movie felt small, this big strange scifi world just a backdrop for the usual hero story. I would have been much more interested in a smaller-scale narrative about how people survive in this Great Snow Sea than half-baked spiritualism and magic words that fix everything.

So that was a shame! Still, fun to attend a premiere all the same, and most of the audience seemed to enjoy it more than I did. The team from the studio were actually interviewing people at the exit to the theatre, but I missed the chance to tell them (more politely than the above lol) what I thought. Probably for the best though, they don't really need the advice of some British girl with no industry experience lmao.

After that I made my way back to my hotel to try and get an earlier night. Not a lot of food places were open, especially places doing decent vegetarian food, so I ended up getting a pizza, which was a huge mistake because I know too much cheese makes me feel ill. Next year I gotta make sure to eat earlier.

Saturday was a good end to the festival - besides Barry JC Purves, who I posted about already, I got to see Rintaro! But more on that in a bit~

#l'aventure de canmom à annecy #annecy festival #annecy #kaina of the great snow sea #kaina of the great snow sea star sage #film #anime #tsutomu nihei #Youtube

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canmom · 11 months

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L'Aventure de Canmom à Annecy - Mercredi 2

Next thing for Wednesday: Mexican films, collection "urban and suburban". Mexican animation is the theme of this year's Annecy, which is why all the Gobelins intros are about Mexican stuff. As such there are a number of collections of Mexican animation. I don't think I'll be able to catch all of these, but I want to get a few because I know next to zero about Mexican animation!

So, Urban and Suburban: anything loosely related to cities. This was a pretty varied set for sure! It spanned quite a time frame, from 90s stop motion stuff that looked like it could have aired on Liquid Television to modern stuff using drone timelapses and such. A full three of the films centred on suicides.

Opening the collection we had La Ciudad, which lived somewhere between the UPA style and Cyriak, with a layered digital cutout animation style in three musical acts. I'm not sure I got all of what it was putting down, but the constant motion definitely grabbed me and locked me in.

Sin Sostén was our first suicide film, and the most liquid television in the whole set. Claymation, a businessman jumps off a building, and we see a vivid after death hallucination in which billboards come alive, and a cowboy catches him with a lasso and almost kills him. but in fact he dead rip

Made In Central de Abastos was pretty neat. Mostly it was timelapses from a drone flying backwards through food markets and warehouses, mixed with a bit of stop motion. Something that maybe brings to mind Koyaanisqatsi, but this took on a more chaotic effect.

Desde Adentro was interesting, it was animated by kids at some sort of institution called Reformatoire de Morelia, something like a homeless shelter I think? It was cutout animation depicting a variety of interleaved plots: two gangs of kids, variously stealing from narcos, fighting over money, and at one point skinheads getting involved. Felt kind of like a Fiasco session, or old school newgrounds. At the beginning and end were a few clips of the animators.

Mis multiples suicidios was, as the title suggests, another suicide film. Not a ton of story, but there was a revolving roto'd outline of a naked woman as sketchy figures moved slowly to the edge. Didn't really click with me I'll be honest...

Un día en familia depicts an injured boxer and his family taking a day at the zoo. I don't quite understand the ending of this film - he paid for his family to leave or something? I thought he was paying for a portrait and found myself kind of confused as the camera pulled back on the boxer alone.

Bestias Urbanas depicts a tiny man who sees a vision of cars on the street turning into animals. He is saved from disaster on the crossing by a centaur who shows up. I was briefly distracted in the middle of this one so i probably missed the key shots that make it fit together lol.

Última estación was a fun one in a thickly painted style that made me think of paint on glass. Passengers on a bus are kidnapped by a robot, taking them to a cyborgisation facility where they're turned into chicken brains vendors. The use of light on the nighttime dash across the city was really cool.

Liber was stop motion at a library using light, books, and then ultimately destructive stop motion animation by cutting the pages. Honestly, it didn't do a lot for me.

The Inksect was an example of a really cool visual style applied to a really dumb premise. It's a dystopian future where humans have turned into cockroaches because they don't read enough books, but some are trying to read and become human again. The dystopian city is rendered in a sick angular style and honestly I'd have liked this a lot more without the intro explaining it, even with heavy handed references to the statue of liberty and kafka.

Inventario Churubusco was stop motion using various bits and pieces around a film restoration lab. I was pretty worn out at this point, and honestly I'd be more interested to see how the machines work than stop motion of doors opening and closing lol

La niña del río was very brief. A girl leaves home to evade an arranged marriage, to become part of the river. I think the vo saying everyone can decide their fate regardless of station distracted me from like... this is another suicide one isn't it? fuck

Finally, El Héroe used a very detailed animation style that reminded me of John McCloskey. A man at a subway intervenes to try to stop a girl killing herself, but she calls the guards on him and kills herself regardless. Haha...?

It was a fun collection. Definitely not all hits but it was cool to see stuff I would never catch otherwise!

#l'aventure de canmom à annecy #pictures to be added later

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canmom · 11 months

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L'Aventur de Canmom à Annecy - Jeudi 4: Short Films (Perspectives 1 + Grad Films 4)

After White Plastic Sky my plan was to see some graduation films and then try and get into a screening of Mars Express by Jeremie Perin, which I missed on Monday for bad reasons. While queuing for the short films, I saw that the queue for Mars Express was already filling up two hours in advance, so I decided to join it, because I really wanted to see Mars Express.

I did not get to see Mars Express. After queuing for two entire hours, a bunch of people in front of me got in, but ultimately I was seven places too far back.

Perspectives 1

Pretty disgruntled by this, my friend and I decided to hop into the line for Short Films: Perspectives 1. I did not have high hopes for this one. Perspectives is essentially where Annecy puts the films with worthy political and social messages, about refugees and miscarriages and so forth.

This format kind of sucks, honestly. These films are generally speaking vehicles for a message - maybe they’re just an interview with someone illustrated by short animations for example. Viewed on their own that might be reasonable expressions of their thing. Viewed back to back in a huge block it's exhausting.

Which isn’t to say they’re all bad: the Bulgarian film Depersonalization had some pretty effective imagery set to music (and it helped that it was kinda vague what it was about lol). Here's the trailer, which won't let me embed for some reason:

So, quickly running down the list:

Lost At Sea depicts a Rohingya man on a boat, along with flashbacks to the violence he faced, with a lone singer singing of the plight of the Rohingya people. It's done in a a rotoscope style of rough paintwork, and I can see what they were going for, but it didn't really come together for me. I feel like it could have stood to put more effort into individual characterisation instead of letting everyone melt into a blur of suffering. It seemed laser focused at evoking pity and not much else.

Nurit features a voiceover by an Israeli woman talking about her miscarriage, and the way she came to terms with it, illustrated in a childrens' book sort of style. This one definitely dragged. The animation was not visually interesting enough to add a lot to the voiceover.

Depersonalization - mentioned already above - describes itself thus:

An interpretation about personality loss. The tree grows and buries its crown back in the earth, the world returns to primal matter, the consumer is consumed.

This involved a legit cool sort of scratchy style of depicting volume, with perspective shifts as a crowd of people were pulling each other with yokes, and was generally pretty neat. I don't quite get what they're getting at with 'personality loss', but the animation put me in mind a bit of The Wall or metal album covers. It's probably something alchemical, right? In any case, this one stood out.

Sjeti se kako sam jahala bijelog konja was just incomprehensible if I'm honest. It cut between various images: a man sitting in a coffee shop that was blurring and chromatically aberrating, a knight riding a horse, another knight chopping wood, the barista at the coffee shop (also the narrator) standing in a room that is gradually filling up with salt. The barista said various things, but they all seemed like non-sequiturs. The blurb said "Time continuously elapses, and apathy can trap consciousness into a loop. Escaping this stagnation one can discover the true beauty of existence." So I guess the looping visuals and distortion were supposed to communicate a sense of dissociation, but the resolution was not clear.

Graduation films 4

After that one, my friend and I decided to duck out of Perspectives and have a go at the late night showing of the graduation films instead. I had pretty high hopes for this one: late night showings have been really energetic, and the last set of student films had some crazy good ones.

Unfortunately this set was a bit lower key; a lot of films were just kind of abstractly setting a vibe without much of a narrative per se, and I was a bit too tired and worn out for that. Still, let's run down the list, I don't want to be too mean, obviously all the students worked tremendously hard on these films, it just wasn't my cup of tea at that time.

Feux by Mohammad Babakoohi from France, depicts a dog slowly dying of thirst on a dry riverbed during a riot. Eventually it seems as if rain has come, but it's actually a dust cloud kicked up by cops on motorbikes, who beat the dog and then shoot it. We end with a shot of the dog's skeleton, at last covered by water. The film is done in a heavily textured, painted style. I'm not entirely sure I got it, but rip that dog :(

Carp Xmass by Anna Heribanová is a stop motion riffing on a Czech tradition of eating carp at Christmas, by switching the roles of humans and carp. It's definitely leaning a bit on shock/grossout humour - the carp kids find a swastika instead of a cross or a star in an arrangement of apple pips, you have 'fingers' instead of fish fingers, the street is covered with human bodies... Overall though, compared to the other 'what if fish were humans' film I saw, this felt a bit heavy handed. I definitely remember the credits, which show a carp being killed and gutted in a Czech marketplace in great detail!

Bedroom People by Vivien Forsans was a sort of creepypasta horror kind of vibe. Presented as a USB stick of found footage, it depicts monsters that manifest in people's rooms at night. It's a neat idea and the clips escalate pretty well but I struggle to remember the ending, if it went anywhere with it.

Saltwater by Declan Mckenna... I struggled to remember this one but the trailer jogged my memory. It depicts memories of a gay relationship with fairly minimal animation, and various filters of e.g. LCD subpixels or dot matrix printing to give it an old media feel I guess. But yeah, didn't ultimately leave an impression. Apparently they used AI a bunch, which I didn't realise at all.

Pas Amoureux by Eugénie Bouquet from Switzerland is an illustrated interview with a sex worker discussing her work in 'sexual assistance' for disabled clients. It's another film of the illustrated monologue type which I generally don't click with, but I did find the interview kind of interesting because I have a disabled family member with progressive MS that leaves him mostly paralysed, and a couple years ago now I remember my family hired a sex worker to come in to see him. I wasn't really involved but from what I was told, it sounds like he was helped a lot; it was cool to hear the other side of that dynamic. The sex worker in this video was generally very positive about the whole thing, and talked about how it's less stigmatised than other forms of SW, so she can for example be good friends with the clients' families as well. She ended by saying she wished it was more normal to have sex with people you don't love, which is an interesting framing lol. The animation didn't really add a lot besides something to keep the eyes busy, but this would have been a neat radio segment even without visuals lol.

Dodo by Yi Luo was an odd one. I was pretty tired by this point so I didn't really follow the story until I read the blurb on the website just now. It's about a kid in a mostly monochrome painted world whose dad is a big blue bird. One day dad flies away; the next day some kind of secret police looking guys show up. Dodo stops growing, although this wasn't clear to me; he goes on some sort of spiritual journey inside his mother's chest or something and eventually sprouts wings himself, at which point his dad returns and Dodo at last takes off himself. An easy reading would be to say it's about like antisemitism or something? But it left it pretty open to interpretation. I think I'd like to see this one with a less tired brain to give it a fairer shot.

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Tomoya! by Masataka Kihara from Japan was a welcome dose of energy and levity lol. A group of baseball players are posing for a photograph and horsing around. Tomoha isn't really joining in. As the photo is taken, they all dive forward, crushing Tomoya underneath. At this point Tomoha has a strange encounter with a cicada in a white void in which he learns to dance crazily like the others. It's in this painted style with hypersimplified faces which was definitely unique lol.

Origines d'un monde by Emma Zwickert from France was another vague moody one. Children assemble various bits and pieces into a diorama; allegedly they grow up. I will fully admit I didn't get it, and probably missed the implications. All I can say is not really a film to watch sleepy.

Mano by Toke Ringmann Madsen from Denmark was very solid. It's a CG film depicting a tense moment in the life of two brothers - an protective older brother and his younger sibling who looks up to him. Their mother is neglectful, not buying food; the older brother attempts to steal some money from her boyfriend's jacket to buy food, but he's caught in the act, leading to a tense confrontation. The character animation is very good, and the story arc just the right amount for the runtime. These are some truly moody looking boys lol.

Ispod Maske by Darian Bakliža from Croatia shows the confession of a bully who, in a group of five masked friends, harasses another boy with snowballs and later eggs, while unmasked ends up befriending him at school. Inevitably he is unmasked during one of these attacks, destroying his friendship with the other boy. And that's kind of where it ends. Given the fairly long runtime, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It feels like it might be going for something similar to the first part of koe no katachi in showing how bullying is rationalised, but the scenario was a bit too farfetched for it to feel like something sharply observed. And the style of it didn't really allow a lot of room for emotion and acting.

Cyclepaths by Anton Cla from Belgium is another oblique one. Various acts of violence take place: someone shoots down a drone, a group of men crash their car into a train and then board it with pistols and shoot some of the passengers - presented in a choppy disjointed style without much of a narrative to tie it together. At this point it was kind of one mood piece too many for me.

All in all, this left both of us pretty disappointed. I think what this collection really underlined is that not everyone wants the same things out of the medium of animation lol. It's a tricky line to walk between being too direct, with the illustrated monologue, and too oblique, with the vague abstract mood piece. You can absolutely do vague and confusing and non-narrative, but you've got to work pretty hard to sell that. You need compelling visuals and strong enough editing to make it flow well and feel satisfying. Music is a huge help.

Anyway, that's the end of Thursday. Of course I saw a bunch more stuff today, including a premiere, so I'll have to write that up tomorrow on the way home lol. Tomorrow I check out of my hotel and hopefully, hopefully, catch Mars Express at last. So goodnight for now!

Also, also, even if I wasn't impressed with these films, the festival is still a blast. This has been the best week I've had in so long, and I cannot wait to come back next year with the experience to play my cards better lol. (I'll soon be making an index of all these writeups and at some point, making a special page on my site where you can filter the comments in various ways.)

#l'aventure de canmom à annecy #annecy film festival #annecy #animation #film #Youtube

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canmom · 8 months

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Das Abenteuer der Canmom in Köln (zur Gamescom)

It's time for canmom to have another adventure! What will that wacky lil porygon do next?

[you may be wondering, whatever happened to the plan to transfer l'aventure de canmom à Annecy to the main site for easier reading? that's still planned to happen, hopefully pretty soon! I've just been very busy.]

So: I work for a small VR games company called Holonautic. I've been working for them for around four months now (time flies)! This week some of us were in Cologne, Germany, attending Gamescom. Until this trip I hadn't met any of them in person, and indeed only had a vague idea what they looked like, because the modern world is wacky that way.

What's Gamescom? It's a major industry expo where game devs show off their games to the public and journalists, and otherwise have various industrial sorts of chats. The event fills a massive convention centre (the Kölnmesse), similar to the Excel Centre in London. Thousands and thousands of gamers enter in massive queues, and once inside, they queue up some more to get a chance to play some work in progress games at massive display booths.

Or maybe they go to the indie room, where there are hundreds of tiny desks just wide enough for a dev to set up a computer with a demo... or the retro games area, where various old consoles were set up for people to play... or one of the zones set up for laser tag or something like that. There was a lot going on!

Even Cthulhu came down to check out the games.

My own experience of Gamescom involved very little of that. With my Trade Visitor badge I could skip the queues, but most of my time was spent in a corner of the Business Area demoing our game to influencers, other devs and members of Meta and Unity, and then heading out to restaurants to have dinner with other VR devs in the evening. I had a good time though! It was great to meet the rest of Holonautic in person, and get to see the sights of Köln a tiny bit. And it was a very rewarding feeling to see other people enjoy the game I'd been working so hard on.

So in this post I'm going to talk about my trip, do a bit of amateur sociology, think about the place of videogames in the world and all that - and also talk a little about how the game sausage gets made - at least as far as I can without breaking NDA. Sadly, the game I spent most of the weekend demonstrating remains under wraps, so I'll have to tell you about that another day. I didn't get to see a ton of games but I'll also talk about the handful of indies I did see!

This time I travelled by train (non-transport nerds, feel free to skip this paragraph), taking the Eurostar from St. Pancras to Brussels, and then the ICE 19 to Cologne. Although it was slower and a bit more expensive than flying, once you factor in the time it takes to travel out to the airport, and the security generally being much more straightforward, I think I much prefer the trains. I spent my journeys drawing other passengers (coming soon to @canmom-art) and reading Osamu Tezuka's manga Ayako (which will be its own post). It was all told very straightforward and comfortable.

[minutiae: I thought I was clever by getting an Interrail pass instead of just buying tickets the usual way, but I didn't realise that you also have to pay for seat reservations, so in the end the Interrail probably cost about as much for a 'there and back again' type of trip.]

By far the most expensive part of the trip was the hotel room. We stayed in a hotel pretty close to the centre of Cologne, but it turned out that its proximity to be about 15 minutes walk from public transport, so we didn't end up saving that much travel time. Since I ultimately spent almost no time in my hotel room, I think if I go next year, the call will be to stay at a hostel. But anyway, let's talk games.

How a game gets released on the Quest

So, Holonautic specialises in VR games. I wrote about our previous games in this very nerdy post, but in brief, there are broadly two major types of VR game: PC VR and standalone VR. For PC VR, the game runs on a computer, and the headset just contains a screen and something that can be tracked. For standalone VR, the headset is essentially a powerful Android smartphone with a custom OS; it uses the headset's cameras for tracking and does all the computing on the headset.

With the success of the Oculus/Meta Quest series, standalone VR became really, really popular - much more so than PCVR ever was. It makes sense: for native games you don't need a powerful gaming PC and there are no cables to trip over or expensive base stations, but you can still play PCVR games if you want to. Almost all of Holonautic's games are Quest-native.

For PCVR games, you can use one of various APIs, such as OpenXR, to wire up your game to VR tracking and input. Moreover, Valve built pretty good VR support into Steam, and since Steam is pretty much anything-goes, it's pretty easy to release a PCVR game in a way people can get it - but marketing is all on you, as with any Steam game.

The Quest is a different story. Compared to other consoles, Meta (which absorbed Oculus a few years ago) occupies a bit of a strange position in this industry, simultaneously the hardware manufacturer, the only publisher, and also a developer of first-party titles.

I don't have any good pictures for this part so here's me in a massive cathedral. Metaphors? No no. It's just a holiday photo...

There are two ways that games can get released on the Quest. There's the store, which is heavily curated: here, Meta acts as a publisher, releasing only games they think will sell, but they also put games through months of QA and handle all the marketing for you (i.e. putting it in front of people when they boot up the Quest). To get on the store, you basically need to have an in at Meta - there's a whole process, I'll talk about that in a moment. There's also 'App Lab', which is much less heavily vetted - but also it's a lot harder to get an audience on App Lab. If a game is particularly successful on App Lab, Meta may end up promoting it to the store. But a lot of games just languish there.

Of course, just because you have a liaison at Meta does not mean you have a free pass onto the store. There's a whole series of stages you have to go through: first you write up a detailed pitch, then if approved (based on what else may be in the works, Meta won't approve two overly similar games), you have a few months to make a 'Minimum Viable Product' prototype of your game and show it to Meta. I joined the company about a month before the MVP was due on our game.

Assuming your contact at Meta likes the MVP, you get a few more months to make a 'Vertical Slice', which is essentially a small portion of your game that's more or less complete. (For example, a single level.) Then, you show this to Meta again. If you make a good impression, they'll give you the go-ahead to finish the game and release it on the store.

Here's another random picture of Köln from the famous Hohenzollern Bridge. Are you saying this wall covered in padlocks is symbolic of something? Overactive imagination, I tell you.

So if yo uwere wondering, the last few weeks of intense work were all about making that vertical slice be as good as possible (and it got pretty clutch at the end). Since we were all going to be at Gamescom, we agreed with our guy at Meta that we'd demo the game in person.

The upshot of all this is that selling a VR game is heavily heavily shaped by Meta, and specifically the individual at Meta who makes the call. Holonautic has a longstanding contact with a laid-back American guy I'll call W.; he has in the past championed some of our games like Hand Physics Lab that left other Meta staff unconvinced. (As it turns out, W. was right and Hand Physics Lab was successful.) But he's not shy about saying that a game doesn't make the cut and should go to AppLab instead. Our game would live or die based on W.'s opinion.

But not just W.; Meta itself as an organisation is also looking for certain things, shaped by its internal politics. They have new features they want to tout - so if you can come up with a game that uses mixed reality, hand tracking and shared anchors that's probably going to count in your favour. And they have certain directions they are keen to push: sporty exercise games are in favour at the moment.

What does this mean for the evolution of the medium? Well, of course people will make the games they want to make, and just because Meta likes an idea doesn't mean it will sell. But Meta does have a lot of power to dictate the general direction of VR games - and if the Apple Vision Pro takes off in a few years, Apple will no doubt end up with a similar role.

It's been interesting to see the forces that shape a game up close: our ideological desire to make things that are new and different and meet our personal tastes, balanced against the need to have successful games to keep the company afloat (good old M-C-M'), and the need to satisfy Meta; all of this leaves its fingerprints on the game.

To not keep you in suspense, I think the demo to W. went pretty well; I can't really say more than that. It was also a good chance to tell the Meta guys about the parts of their APIs that are jank and hard to use - and to their credit they were apparently rather desperate to get feedback and I feel hopeful that they'll make it better.

It's hard to talk about Meta, because it's just such a massive organisation. We can talk about massive erosion of privacy, enabling genocide in Myanmar, and so on - but we're dealing with a small sub-corner of this huge beast, which is less a social media company and more of a games publisher and console manufacturer. But I definitely understand why someone wouldn't want to let a Facebook device loaded with cameras into their house! I could go more into privacy and the Quest 2 but it would be way too long a tangent. Ultimately this is probably a 'no ethical consumption'/'we live in a society' type of deal - one day Meta's domination will erode and we'll have to deal with a different superpower.

Whatever happens, we can continue to explore what's possible in this medium! I think of all the ethical bargains that must be made with the tech industry, I have done OK.

What Cologne is like

On Tuesday, I arrived in Cologne Central Station (Köln Hauptbahnhof) and walked over to my hotel, where I met my colleagues. Most of them looked fairly similar to how they'd set up their VR avatars... but none of them had realised I'm super tall. surprise, bitches ;p

We went out to an Indian restaurant where we all ended up ordering biryani. This being Germany, the portions were massive, so I asked for mine to be in a box to finish later, forgetting that my hotel room had no fridge or microwave and I'd have zero time to eat it (rip). Overall I think I hit it off pretty well, and we chatted for a while about games we liked, the mess that happened at Za/um, movies and the like - it was good to get a chance to interact more casually in person instead of only ever talking about work stuff. Everyone was exhausted from travel so we turned in pretty early, though probably not as early as the restaurant would have liked...

The thing that surprised me most about Cologne is how much it didn't feel strange or unfamiliar. If not for all the signs in German and cars driving on the right, you could drop me in an area of Cologne and tell me it's an unfamiliar part of London and I'd easily believe you. The parts of the city that are filled with business parks and glass-fronted chain stores could exist almost anywhere on Earth.

That said, there are some ways the Germans do things differently! One is restaurants. I visited three different restaurants and two of them worked on a 'self-service' model. Essentially, you order your food at the bar, and they give you a little buzzer device. When it buzzes, you go back up to the bar and collect your food. Nobody would wait tables, there would just be one person behind the bar taking orders and such (though someone would still have to clean your table).

Restaurants also close very early in Cologne. I think a couple of times we put staff in an awkward position of wanting to go home but having to sit around until our party was done. That said, at one point I walked through a riverside area with a few dozen steakhouses, and that seemed to stay open a lot later.

Köln has a decent amount of graffiti, a surprisingly large portion of it in English. Under most bridges there's usually a good number of tags. I didn't manage to get any good photos but shout out to the person who wrote something like 'this world is too damn loud', which is a big mood for autistic girl walking away from a convention centre lmao.

Wednesday: in which our heroine finds out what an influencer is

The next morning we all went down to a German bakery (pictured above). According to my colleagues, the thing to get is a Bienenstich, or 'Bee Sting', a kind of cake with crispy honeyed almond flakes on top and cream in the middle. Here's a really bad photo:

It was pretty tasty!

We scooted over to the convention centre on the metro, and made our way in. I started getting used to navigating the Messe. Our company didn't get our own booth this year, but XR game devs are pretty tight-knit, and Niantic, creators of Ingress and Pokémon Go, there to promote their new phone-based AR Monster Hunter game - lent us some space in their booth to do a demo to the popular VR influencers Cas and Chary.

We headed over to Hall 8 and none of us could find the Niantic booth. Eventually we figured out why: the Niantic booth was outdoors. On a very bright summer day.

The Quest 2 has a bit of a finicky relationship to light. If it's too dark, the cameras can't pick up anything and tracking can fail - hand tracking is especially susceptible. But bright sunlight is also a problem. Essentially, the controllers on the Quest 2 contain small infrared LEDs, which are tracked by the headset's cameras. This works very well, in general - but in the sun, the background infrared radiation can completely overwhelm these LEDs and the controllers become essentially unusable. You also have to be very careful never to let the sun shine through the lenses inside the headset when you take it off, or the focused sunlight can destroy the screen.

So, an outdoor demo was a problem. Luckily, Niantic had an air-conditioned tent in their little zone. We all filed into the tent and started testing the headsets. Even inside a tent, it was too bright for the Quest 2 hand tracking... but we managed to figure out the Quest Pro still worked (since it uses cameras in the controllers for tracking), and rushed to test everything would work. Before long, Cas and Chary arrived, and we demoed the game. Look mum, I'm in a tweet:

Before this convention I had very little knowledge of the whole world of VR influencers, and honestly I still don't, but it seems to be a big thing - a good word from an influencer is a massive boost to a game's chances. I'm still not entirely sure what the difference is between an influencer and a journalist; both are in the business of reviewing new tech and games and rely on a reputation of unbiased analysis for credibility, and both are courted by devs hoping to promote their games. I guess an influencer is like a fully independent journalist? In any case, Cas and Chary were really sweet in our extremely brief meeting, and it was amazing to see the first people from outside the company having fun with our game.

We got word that bHaptics, a Korean company which makes haptic suits and gloves for use with VR devices, had some space in their booth and were willing to let us do some demos there. So we set off back down the entire length of the convention centre to go into the secret Business Area.

Wednesday at Gamescom is restricted to trade visitors, meaning it's much less crowded than the later days. On those later days, that restriction only applies to the three halls designated as the Business Area. Like regular Gamescom, these halls are divided into flashy booths trying to sell you stuff, but in this case it's mostly companies trying to sell services and tools to developers: backend services, special 3D pens, anti-cheat... also a bunch of stands selling merch and figurines for some reason (maybe because they want to manufacture tie-in merch for your game), as well a bunch of national organisations promoting the game development scene in xyz country.

The Belgian stand functioned as a meeting spot, and they were also handing out vouchers for free beer. A strategy that seemed to be quite effective, judging by how crowded their booth became that evening.

We tested our headsets in the bHaptics zone, and discovered DOTS Netcode's prediction/rollback is good enough to make the game feel smooth even on public convention centre wifi, which was rather satisfying - so you know, good job Unity! Unfortunately the Shared Anchors continued to be a pain. We briefly ran into the head of DOTS at Unity and arranged a demo, scooted off to meet W. from Meta who bought us drinks, scooted over to Niantic again to meet some members of XR Bootcamp (a training course in XR game dev, whose cofounders Ferhan and Rahel seem to be the glue that holds the whole XR dev scene together), and at last wandered back to the Belgian zone...

...and then I went back to bHaptics to have a go at their gear. I didn't take a photo (rip) so here's a photo by CNet showing the full bHaptics getup, which in combination looks... kind of like you're the member of the SWAT team on washing up detail...

(source: Scott Stein/CNet)

I had never gotten to try any sort of haptic suit before this, so it was quite novel. Essentially the vest contains 40 (or 16) vibration motors; the gloves contain further motors on the tips of each finger, and there's another motorised ring between you and the headset. There are also motorised wrist bands, motorised ankle bands...

The first demo was designed to showcase the features of the suit and wristbands, so you could try out various actions like shooting guns or putting stuff in a backpack with and without haptics. A second demo focused on manipulating objects: no wristbands, just the glove and hand tracking.

Of the various devices, the most convincing was probably shooting with the haptic suit. Vibration motors are well-suited for brief, intense pulses, and firing guns definitely felt more impactful with the suit on - not a perfect simulation of impact, but a strong effect. The backpack demo was especially impressive: it really felt like dropping heavy objects into a backpack. You also got to shoot at your own mirror image and feel the bullet/laser impacts, which felt like a rather roundabout way to give myself a back massage, but I could see it being effective in the right game.

The hand demo convinced me less. The problem is that vibration is a poor simulacrum of pressing against a solid surface, so it just felt distracting to have a vibration pulse when i grabbed an object - and you still had the usual physics jank associated with manipulating objects in VR using hand tracking. The final section of the hand tracking demo was social interaction: you were faced with rotated clone avatar, and you could shake your hand, punch or slap yourself, or give yourself a hug. As someone who lives half a world away from most people I love, I think giving someone a hug in VR would be a fantastic use of the technology, but sadly this hug was... not entirely convincing. It is very hard to simulate a steady touch with vibration motors.

Ultimately I think the best use for this haptic gear may not be simulation fidelity, but more abstract: similar to the haptic suit used in certain public demos of Rez Infinite, pulsing in time to music. Such uses are mentioned on the bHaptics site, and I'd love to have been able to try that kind of demo. (And yeah, I'm sure you could hook it up to the other kind of remote-controlled vibrating devices if you so desired, though you'd probably have to do a bit of work to wire everything up.)

It was really cool to finally get to experience haptics, and I was very grateful to the bHaptics members for taking the time to show me their gear.

After I'd satisfied myself, I caught up with the gang; we went out to dinner with other XR devs at a Turkish restaurant called Bona'me near the river. (The food was tasty and had a decent amount of vege options, once again in huge portions but this time we split them between the table. ...and once again we were the last table to leave by a long way, and I feel bad for the staff who had to sit around waiting for us.)

There, I met a solo dev called Ben Outram, who's spent the last three years working on a game called Squingle, a fascinating psychedelic game about manipulating bubbles in a world of DMT-core abstract visuals. (Honestly, check this game out, it's nuts. Meta are sleeping on it, it should absolutely have a full store release.)

Thursday: chaos reigns

On Thursday it somehow ended up that in the space of an hour, we would be demoing our game to the head of DOTS development at Unity (whose name I somehow never managed to catch), demoing our other game Cybrix to Cas and Chary, and then doing the big important demo for meta. Then it turned out that our metro line was blocked by an accident up ahead. We hurried out to get an Uber, and our driver gave us a rather... exciting ride; he rolled down the window to argue with another driver and dropped us off in the middle of the road while we waited in traffic. Rather harried, we arrived back at the bHaptics corner and set up for the demos in an unused area of floor nearby.

I'm not sure if I can say too much about how our demos went, but unfortunately we ran into some versioning issues and were not able to show Cybrix to Cas and Chary before they had to rush off (we weren't the only one to face transport issues that morning). Lesson learned: test everything, not just the part you're worried about. It's not the end of the world, though, and we all headed over to W.'s hotel, into a swanky suite with a nicely laid table for the most important demo of the week. We had the room for maybe 20 minutes, then we were out the door again to the lobby of another hotel to talk it over.

After that... suddenly the afternoon was free, ish. We went back into Gamescom and ate some very expensive ramen. Then, word came that some more influencers wanted to try out our games, so it was back to bHaptics and well, the story gets a little repetitive at this point :p I can't say much more than that without talking about our game, so I will just have to say that the demos went well.

This was my view for most of Gamescom.

At the end of the day, I had a couple of free hours to scoot over to the indie games area and try out some games before everyone went home. At this point my social batteries had run very dry indeed so I was glad to get some time to just play games.

The indie zone was divided into lots and lots of small booths, typically just wide enough for one computer. And even late in the evening, it was very, very busy...

This is just one small corner of the indie area.

Not really knowing almost any of these games, my 1337 MLG Pro Gamescom strat was to wander around until I spotted an empty chair and then play whatever game was going and chat with the dev if they were around. This worked out pretty well! I'll write up the games I played in a moment, but first I'm overdue to wax philosophical.

What was really striking about walking around the indie area is just how many games there are. Wandering around you can pretty quickly spot patterns and influences just by glimpsing at screens (here's a combat tutorial, there's a crafting/survival game, and yonder a narrative game that's borrowed the entire interface of Disco Elysium).

I've seen, up close and personal now, just how much fiddly effort and dedication it takes to make a game. There's something kind of strange and alienating to me about encountering all this creative output in a massive aggregate, where you can only give it maybe half an hour in a noisy room, surrounded by a dozen more or less similar games, in a way that kind of demands you rapidly assign it into a broad, combinatoric category: x art style, y core mechanic, z emotional register. Presenting this game this way really seems to file them all down to Content, which can be boxed and tagged and matched to a consumer with the appropriate set of subculture flags.

One thing that is distinctive about games as a medium to me is the very strong separation between 'mechanics' and 'presentation'. To produce a game you don't just need a system to manipulate, but also associate it with a narrative to make it comprehensible and lend it some sort of affective impact.

So you could theoretically make a game with the exact same mechanics as, say, Half-Life 2 - the same movement, the same enemy hitboxes, the same collision geometry and shooting mechanics and progression - but a completely different presentation style and telling a completely different story. Indeed, a typical early stage of game development has placeholder 'programmer art' and 'greybox' levels.

Equally, you could lift the iconography of a game and drape it over a completely different mechanical substrate - and indeed, it isn't at all uncommon for major franchises to launch spinoffs in different genres.

So games as a medium consist of all these different pieces which you can attach in various ways to define a game which you can name. And once this is done, that game becomes in a sense 'concrete': we act as if Half-Life 2 is an object with a distinct existence. It's a powerful social construct. Then, a successful game is then one which manages to unify all these disparate elements into some sort of whole that feels coherent. Game development sees all the possible elements of a game gradually collapse into whatever gets released. It's highly stochastic: an arbitrary decision by a tired dev, or even a glitch, might later become fixed as one of the core icons of the great 'Franchise'.

When there were less games around, and it was a lot harder for people to get their hands on dev tools, it made sense to think of games as solid, discrete things. Whatever you got on the cartridge or disc was pretty much immutable. Now, though, most major games operate as a 'service' that is constantly modified, and it is not uncommon either for players to mod a game, on a continuum from small changes like injecting shaders or changing music, to total conversion mods that are a 'whole new game'.

And indie games, then... you've got a subculture which heavily emphasise sharing techniques, and it's just as beholden to genre as AAA games. The existence of all these games side by side, even though each one has its own name and identity, seems to further break up "games" into combinations of pieces. When I encounter a new third-person action game, it's as a variation on a kind of broader, abstracted super-game. My first task is to discover the particular quirks of this manifestation of the third person action game. The days when we had a shared culture of 'games everyone has played' are basically already gone, but we still have a certain degree of shared context, because each game is a probe into that constantly evolving game-space, which someone has gone to the trouble to fish out and decorate...

I suppose this is all coming back around to the otaku database thing, isn't it? Or just semiotics in general...

Anyway, here's what I found on Thursday:

I played an FPS called Serum, in which the core conceit is that you inject big syringes into your arm to give yourself powerups. Otherwise, it seems to be a game about gathering and crafting. Sadly the demo computer didn't have headphones, so I was missing sound, and seemed to be a bit underpowered for the game. Nevertheless, I walked around a bit, manufactured a healing serum, and shot some wolf and rabbit monsters with a bow and arrow.

I feel like I was rather ruder than I intended to be, because in talking to the dev afterwards, the first thing I mentioned was the performance issues and he had to apologise like, yeah, we're running it on a laptop (it sounded like he said with a 3070? but I must have misheard him, unless he has very high standards for underpowered), it does run better on a proper computer. The environment design in this game was definitely really strong. Not quite sure how the serum mechanic would work in practice - it sounds quite like Bioshock's plasmids, but the demo didn't really give the opportunity to try out the different options.

I played Dead Pets Unleashed, an adventure game about a demon girl in a struggling punk band. One of the devs was hanging out with this one and generally had a great vibe, joking about how almost nobody picked a certain option and suggesting the route that would get the most out of the demo.

The game uses a sidescrolling perspective with hand-drawn sprites. The art style is very consciously flat, its population of monster people allowing an impressive variety of colours. It broadly alternates between conversations with choices that adjust stats (e.g. +punk, -social) and a variety of minigames - there was a music minigame of course (the conceit being chasing away intrusive thoughts), but I also washed a dildo, constructed a hot dog, and waited tables. Generally it oozed style, absolutely nailing the punk vibe, and had a bunch of cute features like changing your character's outfit. You can play the same demo on Steam. I think this is one I might well get when the full release comes.

And then I played... a game I can't even find now! I really should have made a note or taken a picture or something. It was a kind of Amanita-like point and click game in which you play a tin can person, manipulating objects as you try to rescue your can dog, descending into a city made of cardboard boxes. The puzzles were occasionally a bit obtuse, but the cute style really carried it. The devs weren't on hand for this one, but they did have a wall where you could leave postit notes with your comments on the game, including one with a fairly essential hint for the first puzzle. It was called something like 'can world' or 'box world', but at this point, I can't find it anywhere. It's a shame because I thought it was neat.

That was all I had time for on Thursday: I zoomed off to another restaurant by the river to eat some more falafels. Someone let off some fireworks for some reason.

We started to make our way back, across the famous Hohenzollern Bridge, which is one of those bridges with a tradition that lovers will attach a padlock to the fence to symbolise how long their relationship will last.

At this point the padlocks have started to resemble kudzu, hanging down in strands of linked padlocks, or even growing up onto the superstructure of the bridge on chains. Questionable symbolism or not, it all makes for a fantastic textural effect, especially since it maintains the sheer density of padlocks for the entire length of the bridge.

While we were crossing, a boat passed under the bridge carrying some kind of a party. From a distance, all you could really see was a mass of glowsticks, and all you could hear was the ghost of the beat. It was a cool sight.

At this point I was pretty much completely exhausted so while there was some kind of industry party I definitely could not handle the crowds and walked home past the cathedral for an early night, eager to head in early to Gamescom tomorrow with a good night's sleep...

Friday: just like in my Bloodbornes, amirite gamers?

Predictably I overslept. Since I'd only get a few hours at Gamescom, I decided to visit the famous cathedral. I took that photo that I posted earlier, where somehow my little phone camera absolutely nailed the lighting, even if the cathedral is severely out of focus...

I headed inside the building too.

Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom) is a bit of an oddball, historically. While it wasn't uncommon for cathedral-building projects to last a century, after working on this thing from 1248–1560 they downed tools, leaving the city with a half-finished cathedral for about 300 years.

They had the front and back of a cathedral, with a big crane on the front part.

In the 1800s, the middle ages were in and the state decided it would be a good idea to have a big cathedral - both to make their new Catholic subjects happy and a symbol of THE NATION. After raising a stonking amount of money with one of the world's first NGOs, they built the rest of this thing, which briefly became the tallest building in the world. Hooray, said Emperor Wilhelm I. I love being a big strong nation with a big cathedral dick.

The cathedral survived the first world war, but got hit by a lot of bombs in the second - though the towers remained standing. After the war, they put it back up again. Now, it's a tourist attraction. Transsexual atheists can walk in and turn their phone to funny angles to try and capture the ceiling...

You can call this a Deutsch angle, because... ok whatever guys they can't all be winners.

They've got some old school Christian-style guro in here.

The interior is pretty cool: huge vaulted ceiling, massive stained glass. The stained glass unfortunately photographs really poorly on a phone, the colours washed out pretty much no matter what. They did have this funky ladder contraption, which I assume is probably used for maintaining/washing the windows...

After a little while in there I decided this was pretty neat but I'd go to Gamescom, to say goodbye to everyone and maybe get a glance at some of the mainstream game zones. As it turned out we had another demo lined up, so we went back to The Corner Near BHaptics and did the routine. This time the audience was mostly other VR devs so I got to have some nice technical discussion.

At last, I had about an hour before my train. I thought about exploring the indie game zone some more, but decided I should really at least take a glance through the other halls. What I discovered was... queues! Many many queues. And various elaborate dioramas.

Sometimes they had actors to go with them. I decided to include the people taking the photo because... I don't even know what I was going for with this one to be honest, it seems kind of banal.

Here's a queue of people waiting to play Rogue Trader, which boldly tells you it's the first(!) CRPG in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, hopefully not also the last. 'Warhammer CRPG' is a concept that 16-year-old Bryn would have gone completely insane about. 31-year-old Bryn was still a bit curious, but not enough to wait for a sitting down queue with less than an hour left at the con.

I didn't take a lot of photos of the Extremely Gamer Shit, but for a taster, this lady was DJing a set on something called the 'Leet Desk', which appears to be a desk with built in RGB lighting, billed as 'the desk for gamers', because we can no longer contain the rainbow puke. When I walked past, she was playing an EDM remix of a tune that I vaguely recognised from a movie or a game but couldn't place specifically, which felt about right. Maybe it was Skyrim?

A lot of people walked around with the Hoyoverse bag, Hoyoverse being the collective term for the games of Chinese developer miHoYo such as Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact. Their slogan was 'tech otakus save the world', which thanks to their cunning move of handing out large bags, was soon paraded all over the convention. I feel like the jury is still out on the impact (ha ha) of tech otakus on the world...

In the end, the last hour was spent briefly walking around to see the halls and then I left to say my goodbyes and hop back on the train. The journey back was totally straightforward. I finished reading my manga and drew some more train passengers, who were generally pretty happy to be drawn.

Cosplay

It's a con, there's gotta be cosplayers right? Sure enough, the crowd was peppered with stormtroopers, kitsune, army men, luffies and various spooky skull guys... I didn't get many photos but here's a couple.

Obligatory stormtroopers. Luckily, the inside of the con was airconditioned, those suits look toasty.

These three kindly stopped to pose for me. I don't know what game they're doing, Dead by Daylight maybe? DbD girls, tell me ^^'

This robot-girl cosplayer's costume is neat: when you look close you see it's made of old PC parts. Or at least the casings of them. I spotted a graphics card and an old VR headset. She also has built-in stilts so she towered over everyone, big respect. She was hanging out in the hall on Wednesday, so she might have been there in an official capacity, but I didn't get a chance to talk to her.

Observations of demographics and stuff

It's been a good long while since I've been to any sort of nerd convention. Mostly I've been to scifi/media fandom cons like Nine Worlds and Worldcon, or general nerd-shit cons like MCM Expo, and in the old old days, Warhammer cons like Game Day. But this event being specifically a gaming expo was pretty new to me.

Predictably the demographics skewed male (but not overwhelmingly) and white/East Asian (almost without exception). The various national organisations present were primarily European (which tracks for an event in Germany) but there were large stands e.g. promoting Korean game dev or the Guangzhao region of China. In the indie zone, there were a good handful of Japanese devs, and I spotted one game that was fully in JP. Here and there, you'd spot banners promoted other gaming expos - a lot in Europe, but also there is apparently a Gamescom Asia in Singapore, and a Tokyo Indie Games Summit which sounds pretty fun. By contrast, while I don't have any real stats to substantiate, I would say I saw very few organisations were promoting game devs from South America, Africa or Oceania.

Beyond that... this is very definitely a place for nerds, but there's a lot of different varieties of nerd you can be now. So sure, T-shirts with slogans and cargo shorts for many, but equally you could dress super goth, you could show off all your tattoos, you could go in your colourful coordinated kitsune cosplay or just wear some bright hair die. I'm confident I saw a few other girls from the isle of 🏳️‍⚧️, but 'hello I clocked you let's be friends' is not the best introduction even from another trans girl lmao - in general I didn't really talk to people besides the group I had arrived with. I think if I'd gone alone, it would not be the sort of con where you make a lot of friends, but who knows?

All in all, a solid adventure. I'll probably go again next year, if I can find somewhere cheaper to stay. I never did get to see the chocolate museum.

ok, story over - thanks for reading, nerd ;p

#gamescom #computer games #adventures of canmom

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