Annecy Festival's 100 Films for a Century of Animation

Although not the first feature-length animated film, as is sometimes thought, it was the first cartoon to feature a character with an appealing personality. The appearance of a true character distinguished it from earlier animated "trick films", such as those of Blackton and Cohl, and makes it the predecessor to later popular cartoons such as th...

An animated film by French auteur Émile Cohl, one of the earliest examples of hand-drawn film animation. Drawing inspiration from J. Stuart Blackton and the Incoherents of club Hydropathes, the film, with all its wild transformations, sees our protagonist materialize a movie theatre, meet an elephant and escape from jail; A morphing, stream-of-c...

Three surreal depictions of failures of communication that occur on all levels of human society.

A wooden rocking chair serves as a tool to delve through the history of Quebec in the last century.

The story of one shepherd's single-handed quest to re-forest a desolate valley in the foothills of the French Alps throughout the first half of the 20th century.

Skazka Skazok (Tale of Tales) is a 27-minute animated short film, considered the masterpiece of influential Russian animator Yuri Norstein. Told in a non-narrative style by free association, the film employs various techniques including puppets, cut-outs, and traditional cell animation. Using classical music and '30s jazz tunes instead of dialogue.

Mussorgsky's composition is the soundtrack for this pin-screen animated take on night and wild things. A scarecrow blows down, clouds move by quickly. Beings take shape; a town appears, animals flee, and a horse gallops by. A child looks on. Monsters run and float by: the phantasmagoric is everywhere. A woman's figure tumbles through space. A cl...

Animated shapes dance to Cuban music. This was one of the first animations to be painted directly onto the film.

"Bartosch showed that animation could be poetic... It was Bartosch who first dared to give animation the dimension of a great art, trusting it to voice his pain, to lay bare his heart, to tell of his hope for a better future - which he never saw." - Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker, 1969

This film deals with a Jewish family in Montreal, Canada as they care for a dying grandmother and the young boy who is impatient to get the room he was promised as soon as she kicks the bucket.

In this Oscar-winning short film, Norman McLaren employs the principles normally used to put drawings or puppets into motion to animate live actors. The story is a parable about two people who come to blows over the possession of a flower.

A playful exercise in intermittent animation and spasmodic imagery. Playing with the laws relating to persistence of vision and after-image on the retina of the eye, McLaren engraves pictures on blank film creating vivid, percussive effects.

The short-tempered Daffy Duck must improvise madly as the backgrounds, his costumes, the soundtrack, even his physical form, shifts and changes at the whim of the animator.

An unknowing man rescues a rather aggressive and demanding harpy.

A baby lamp finds a ball to play with and it's all fun and games until the ball bursts. Just when the elder Luxo thinks his kid will settle down for a bit, Luxo Jr. finds a ball ten times bigger.

Trouble starts when the queen's magic mirror says Betty Boop is fairest.

A humorous and thought-provoking view of what animals in zoos might be thinking about their captivity and surroundings.

A static camera observes a room as it slowly fills with thirty-six characters from different stages of life, looping further through an absurd dance of social disconnection as each character moves in.

Stop-motion animated short film in which a puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself.

In this extraordinary short animation, Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren painted colours, shapes, and transformations directly onto their filmstrip. The result is a vivid interpretation, in fluid lines and colour, of jazz music played by the Oscar Peterson Trio.

A budding romance between two toy dancers is put into dangers when the boy is conscripted into the toy army.

Elmer Fudd is again hunting rabbits - only this time it's an opera. Wagner's Siegfried with Elmer as the titular hero and Bugs as Brunnhilde. They sing, they dance, they eat the scenery.

A father says goodbye to his young daughter. In time the daughter grows old, but within her there is always a deep longing for her father.

Tired of always playing the same roles, Little Red Riding Hood, her grandmother and the Wolf demand a new version of the tale. The story then plays out in a more contemporary urban environment, with Little Red Riding Hood working as a pin-up girl in a night club.

A happy little potter is approached by a huge hand which wants him to sculpt its statue. The potter refuses, wanting nothing more than to be left alone with his only friend, a potted plant. As the hand's request gives way to bribery, demands, and threats, the potter becomes more desperate to escape its clutch, leading to tragedy.

Mickey Mouse, piloting a steamboat, delights his passenger, Minnie Mouse, by making musical instruments out of the menagerie on deck.

A study in pins of a man who loses his nose which becomes a personality in its own right.

A king and his hunting party shoot down birds. A magpie escapes the onslaught of arrows and wreaks havoc on the hunting party.

The story of a little boy who would only talk in sound effects. With story by Dr. Seuss (and Bill Scott of Rocky and Bullwinkle fame) this cartoon won the Oscar for best short subject (animated) for 1950.

A blond and a raven-haired beauty move with verve and style through a changing landscape. The fabric of their dresses flows and floats, adding to their allure. One loses a shoe. A young man picks it up and pursues them on his bicycle.

A jilted husband takes his revenge by filming his wife and her lover and showing the result at the local cinema.

Two ballet dancers perform a dance enhanced with surreal after-image visuals.

In this Oscar-nominated animated short film, director Peter Foldès depicts one man’s descent into greed and gluttony. Rapidly dissolving and ever-evolving images create a contrast between abundance and want. One of the first films to use computer animation, this satire serves as a cautionary tale against self-indulgence in a world still plagued ...

When a housewife's girlfriends take her to a male strip club for her birthday, she brings back more than memories.

The fauna of the megalopolis, the jungle of the supermarket, the bedlam of brothels and bars, the effect of the bars in the fog, the swaying ears of corn, the swaying of men hanging from the gallows, the ripple of water – seen by the eye of the animator…

An abstract film in which every motion of coloured shapes is in strict synchronization with music. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2000.

Newlyweds, Adelaide and Jonathan leave New York in 1907 in a boat and row, ignorant of world events, to Europe. The years pass and many things are changing them, love is gradually degrading to hatred, then indifference. Old age is almost here, and with it, in a last swim, a last embrace, husband and wife end up “alone at last.” The boat adrift, ...

Two boys go outside at night to capture a bird. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2003.

A short Surrealist animation from Denmark which begins with a zoom into a Paul Delvaux painting, then reverses the process by pulling back from a continually changing picture.

Spoof of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) with an all-black cartoon cast. One of the “Censored 11” banned from TV syndication by United Artists in 1968 for racist stereotyping.

In this powerful abstract film with a soundtrack of African drum music, Lye scratched "white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches" on to black leather, using a variety of tools from saw teeth to arrow heads. The first version of the film won a major award at the International Experimental Film Festival Held in Brussels in 1958 in association with the W...

‘La course à l’abîme’ is a depiction of the final ride into hell from ‘La Damnation de Faust’ (1846) by Hector Berlioz.

Young Vincent Malloy dreams of being just like Vincent Price and loses himself in macabre daydreams which annoys his mother.

A fantasy biography of Franz Kafka, bringing to life the writer's diaries and photographs.

Anchin, a young monk on a pilgrimage with his master, asks the widow Kiyohime to stay the night. The widow falls in love with him but he rejects her, lying that he will return.

A facially disfigured author's life with her guardian of a sister is disrupted when a stranger arrives at their door, claiming to be a fan.

A Soviet claymation short film created by Garri Bardin in 1990 that retells the story of Red Riding Hood while incorporating political metaphors and themes about the USSR's demise; the wolf representing communism, devouring innocent creatures who have never known him.

The setting is on a floating platform where a group of evenly and carefully placed men live. Each man is aware that the platform is not stable and in order not to fall to their deaths, they maintain a careful balance of weight to prevent the platform from tipping too far and cause them all to fall.

A little hedgehog, on the way to visit his friend the bear, gets lost in thick fog, where horses, dogs and even falling leaves take on a terrifying new aspect...

A rooster has his last biscuit for breakfast and goes grocery shopping. A pig prepares her breakfast (potato peelings, with the potatoes thrown in the trash) and discovers she needs more milk. Their paths cross, a lemon falls into the sewer, and both lives are changed.