2025 Philly Animation Festival

My unexcused absence from social media kept me from finding out about the first-ever Philly Animation Festival until just a few days before it started, but luckily that was enough time for me to get a festival pass and make plans to attend every screening except the one for kids. In keeping with my Ottawa tradition, I rated and wrote at least a sentence or two about every single film I saw. Watching and reviewing 77 short films in 48 hours is a fairly exhausting task, and the writing that follows isn’t among my best (and I kind of ran out of steam toward the end), but I’m glad to at least have a decently thorough document of the festival from my perspective.

There was a lot of activity in the middle of the ratings, and sadly more on the lower half of the scale than the upper half. As always, I feel bad for being a hater, but I guess I haven’t managed to rewire that part of my brain just yet, and anyway, they can’t all be winners!

It may seem counterintuitive, but I’m not surprised I wasn’t a big fan of the music videos.

Many countries from Europe and Asia were represented, but 74 percent of the films in the festival were from the United States, and more than half of those came from Philly. I suspect it’ll be easier to attract more national and international talent as this festival becomes more established in the years to come.

Philly Life (An Exquisite Corpse)

The Philadelphia Animation Ensemble (Philly Showcase, USA)

Fifty-two filmmakers were assembled to pay homage to Philly in this exquisite corpse film, and the result is as all over the place as you might expect. Amid all the references to sports teams and iconic tourist attractions, there are a few transcendent moments that evoke the character of the city in pleasantly perceptive ways. I gather that no one who wanted to participate was turned away, which I appreciate on a human level, but the chaos of it all is a bit much, and I think a more ruthless editor would have been an asset.

Speed Reader

Jennifer Levonian (Philly Showcase, USA, Spain)

A chronicle of twin sisters, one a focused and insatiable reader, and the other seemingly afflicted with ADHD. Per the title, the reader is the protagonist, and we follow her endlessly paging through books from childhood to middle age, multitasking through various institutional, social, and professional situations. The wordless narrative of the sisters’ relationship gets a bit muddled at the end, but the cutout animation is charmingly lo-fi throughout, and anyone who’s ever found it hard to put down a good book will identify with the title character’s obsession.

This Was Your Life

Alex Salvitti (Philly Showcase, USA)

Not really sure what’s meant to be going on here. Something about a bunch of impressionistic rabbit-like figures descending to hell and being chased by the devil? Dialogue, replete with screen-addled Gen Z vernacular, is provided via silent-film-style intertitles. It makes some interesting use of rotating background images, but mostly it feels like something a bored teenager made on her iPad in an afternoon.

Love Letter

Greta Motter (Philly Showcase, USA)

Some fairly straightforward text on the virtues of keeping a journal, accompanied by a few animated slice-of-life moments. There are some kind of cool experiments in rotoscoping here, but not enough to fill the two-minute runtime, so those moments are all inexplicably repeated, and I didn’t find the thoughts about journaling interesting or insightful. It’s more of a very rough sketch than anything like a finished work.

Missed Connections

Jack Gray (Philly Showcase, USA)

A series of vignettes based on real Craiglist missed connections. The chosen Craigslist posts are surprisingly pretty banal, but their visual staging in glitchy 3-D animation with hyper-saturated colors and noisy textures is amusingly off-kilter, with kooky characters stealing the show in the background.

Jaderabbitjaderabbit

Lily Xie (Philly Showcase, USA)

A meditation on the mythical Jade rabbit, making extended use of a rabbit run cycle in a variety of contexts. It didn’t give me a lot to hold onto, but it has a certain undeniable poetry.

Mine!

Louis Morton (Animated Shorts Block, USA)

A group of coal miners unwittingly sticks it to the man in this innocuously pro-worker, anti-coal film. As a work of advocacy, it’s half-baked, more of a worker power fantasy than a true call for reform, but it looks great, especially the heavily charcoal-textured scenes down in the mine.

The Garden Sees Fire

Kiera Faber (Animated Shorts Block, USA)

A stop-motion film with fantastical anthropomorphic animals whose willful obliquness is at odds with its clearly narrative ambitions. Accordingly, I couldn’t begin to parse said narrative, and I didn’t love its choppy animation, but it was visually distinct with enough confidence to not completely sour me.

Salad

Sijin Lee (Animated Shorts Block, South Korea)

A baby fish finds itself unwelcome in some kind of vegetable utopia. I think I’m both too old and too Western for this one to really reach me.

I Had Nothing

Elyse Kelly (Animated Shorts Block, USA)

Gorgeously animated sweeping lines and color give shape to a gay woman’s stressful emigration from the repressive Congo to the United States. Its final note is a bit conflicted, as the narrator/protagonist is hopeful and without regret, but the closing text emphasizes the border patrol’s tendency to strip émigrés of their belongings.

Whereabouts

Suejee Lee (Animated Shorts Block, USA)

Risograph’s moment in the sun (careful, those inks aren’t lightfast!) continues, and this film makes good use of it, paying quiet tribute to a series of moments that make up life in NYC. As a former New Yorker, it rung true to me.

Murmuration (Zwermen)

Anneke Swinkels, Tim Frijsinger (Animated Shorts Block, Netherlands, Belgium)

Beautifully executed stop-motion surrealism chronicling a retirement community resident’s slow transformation into a bird. Hard to tell if it’s a metaphor for self-actualization, escape, or death, but the journey is undoubtedly rewarding.

Voyage of the Red Rabbit

Sam Gualtieri (Animated Shorts Block, USA)

Part retrofuturistic sci-fi serial, part family document, part contemplation of reincarnation. My two pedantic gripes are that the title lettering falls short of the otherwise high visual quality, and part of it centers on a presumably unscripted conversation with an elderly relative whose diction is decidedly suboptimal. I’m 95 percent sure its abrupt ending was premature, but the screening’s host gave no indication that anything was amiss.

The Places You Go

Shannon Ferguson (Experimental Shorts Block, USA)

An exhausted woman is swallowed up by her bed, initiating a whirlwind of incoherent drawn/cutout imagery, seemingly an evocation of the process of losing consciousness and surrendering to a dream state.

Filkool

Maral Forouzesh, Naser Rezaeiyan (Experimental Shorts Block, Iran)

Far be it from me to oppose art advocating for children with Down syndrome, but this film, which proudly features the voices of several afflicted kids, is not one I can recommend. Stuck here with the “experimental” tag, it seems to me to be pretty plainly narrative, albeit incomprehensibly. A title card at the beginning is meant to set the stage, but it appears too briefly to be fully read.

Witch Island

Hannah Subotnick (Experimental Shorts Block, USA)

A collection of textures in motion, the most recognizable of which are various terrain, perhaps from the titular island.

Wandering Horse

Emily Ann Hoffman (Experimental Shorts Block, USA)

I barely remember anything about this one, but I noted a 2.5 rating for it, and so it shall be.

The Rabbit Always Dies

Oona Taper (Experimental Shorts Block, USA)

Probably the best of the many films in this festival making use of grainy Risograph textures, this film works through a ton of ideas both visually and conceptually, on its winding path through animal testing and glitchy VHS Playboy bunnies to exposing… the froggy origins of the pregnancy test.

Britney Spears: Diaries, Notes, & Sketches

Sam Gurry (Experimental Shorts Block, USA)

Collaged and halftoned performance and tabloid footage of Britney Spears. This art-damaged sort (or any other sort, really) of celebrity obsession is mostly lost on me, but I do love a good halftone.

Enjoying a Nice Life

Rainbow Timothy (Experimental Shorts Block, USA)

Engagingly kinetic abstract expressionist scribbles accompany the unhinged ravings of a cynic who probably still fancies himself an idealist. If the text were taken from a frenzied street preacher, this would be one thing, but I get the impression they are the filmmaker’s own unfiltered proclamations, which somehow makes it less interesting.

Azkena

Ane Inés Landeta, Lorea Lyons (Experimental Shorts Block, Spain)

A collage tribute to the filmmaker’s mother and grandmother and the multitudes they contain, better understood now that the narrator has become a mother herself. Obviously a deeply personal film, but not universal enough for me to find it truly affecting.

Bodega Cat

Emmanuelle Martinez (Student Block, USA)

A simple and well-made 2-D tale of a bodega cat protecting its oblivious owner from a burglar. Nothing too special, but a perfectly pleasant way to spend three minutes.

God Dam

Abigail Hill (Student Block, USA)

A stop-motion mockumentary of the exploits of a pair of beaver postal workers. Pretty impressively realized sets, puppets, and animation for student work, although the well-worn, Office-style vérité grates a bit.

Blu & Rekki – Sold Out

Manny J Taveras (Student Block, USA)

After trying to pirate a video game, two dudes are stalked by DRM come to life. Another perfectly fine 2-D student animation I will forget about immediately.

Metal Flower

Seoyun Kim (Student Block, South Korea)

Looks like this 3-D tale of a robot selling flowers was made entirely by one student, and its overachievement will be sure to land them a job, but technical acumen notwithstanding, all its creative decisions are pure hackery straight from the Pixar playbook.

The Dreaming World

Alexi Scheiber (Student Block, USA)

It pains me to criticize someone who’s young and dreaming big, but it’s hard not to cringe a bit at this film’s abundantly earnest fantasy of a post-capitalist utopia where humanity lives a frictionless existence in harmony with nature. Still, it’s a nicely realized fantasy, painting vivid, flowering green spaces and sustainable housing over real footage of gas stations and parking lots.

My Popo’s Favourite Colour Is

Winnie Chua (Student Block, Singapore)

Sometimes telling students to write what they know is a mistake, because let’s be honest, they can be a pretty myopic bunch. Case in point, this film that ultimately makes the animation about the animator, mostly within the confines of a dorm room. Most of the oblique family tribute on offer is animated on Post-Its (spoiler alert: Popo’s favorite color is yellow), in a variable frame rate I found tough to stomach.

Mnemonic

Raffaele Gans-Pfister (Student Block, USA)

Yay, I love to see an exercise in abstraction using a completely unreasonable amount of plasticine, especially when the images it creates, though arguably body-horror-adjacent, are more architectural than figurative.

文哲加油! (Let’s Go Wen Zhe!)

Judy Zhao (Student Block, USA)

A man who lives in a society of fish boards a bus for outer space. I couldn’t figure out what this one was trying to do, and in some cases that’s fine or even great, but not in this case.

Dance to the Grave

Safiya Wharton (Student Block, USA)

A queer, international, aristocratic romance that was forbidden in its day finally finds its catharsis when the lovers’ skeletons are reanimated, emerge from their graves, and dance the night away. A nice idea, but not fleshed out enough (pun intended) and a little too crudely executed.

The Boy and the Goldfish

Erin Leung (Student Block, UK)

I almost have a perverse respect for how cavalierly this one eschews the idea of a story arc: A kid is forced to endlessly study by his domineering mother, who then shows no pity when disposing of his dead goldfish, the only thing that brought him joy, the end. But there’s little pleasure, ironic or otherwise, to take in its non-story snapshot of domestic misery. The kid is annoying, the mom is terrible, and that’s about it.

Tower

Siqi Wei (Student Block, Japan)

I don’t remember much of the particulars of this one, except that there was a guy and a bird and a whole lot of overwrought transitions.

Footprints in the Sand

Ejun Mary Hong (Student Block, Canada, South Korea)

These films about serious issues try to guilt me into not criticizing them, but I will not be cowed! Apparently cancer is not talked about in Korean culture, and the voiceovers of cancer patients in this film describe how that makes their frightening journey feel that much more isolated. I feel for them, but the film doesn’t give us much to look at as they tell their stories, and the sentimental orchestral music on top of it made its 13 minutes feel extra long.

Lukso ng Dugo

Annika Magbanua (Student Block, USA)

Stylistically about halfway toward a Cartoon Saloon production, I guess this reductive glimpse at strength in the face of domestic abuse is meant to help victims feel seen, but I’m not sure it’s much more than a performatively solemn revenge fantasy.

An Aftermath

Tobi Springer (Student Block, Netherlands)

Another one breaking the fourth wall to show the animator at work, with no discernible benefit.

The Trip

Elham Sadeghian (Student Block, USA)

With each heartbeat, a heart rate monitor literally outlines a moment in a life in progress, from birth to death. I wish it were more expansive, but as a 49-second version of a simple concept, it aquits itelf admirably.

The House Always Wins

Grady None (After Dark Screening, USA)

I sometimes lament the lasting effect Macromedia Flash (now known as Adobe Animate) has had on visual culture, and this film, though not without its outré charms, has too much of a Newgrounds vibe to really make me a fan.

The Corridor

Kourosh Mohammadi (After Dark Screening, Iran)

Beginning as a torso, a body has to overcome a series of trials to assemble itself. I like that its look is reminiscent of Dali and other surrealist painters, but didn’t really enjoy its gamified structure, complete with underwhelming boss battles.

Lint

Luis Hernandez (After Dark Screening, USA)

Like Voyage of the Red Rabbit, this sure seemed to get abruptly cut off, but before it did, its unsettling Beat noir atmosphere was strangely compelling, somewhat reminiscent of Mariusz Wilczyński’s Kill It and Leave This Town.

Homemade Gatorade

Carter Amelia Davis (After Dark Screening, USA)

I have less affection than I used to for creative work that ostentatiously participates in internet culture, but this delightful oddity, equal parts hysterical and skin-crawling, absolutely nails the weird hellscape that is modern online life.

Swol

Eva Grandoni (After Dark Screening, USA)

A very unhealthy looking bee leaves a trail of grotesque destruction in its wake. Not much to it, but distinctly freaky and amusing throughout, and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Primary

Nir Kuby Netz (After Dark Screening, USA)

A maximalist journey through the primary colors, giving loud voice to their respective emotional characteristics across all manner of media. A cool exercise, but feels mostly like empty calories.

Cat Dependence

Lindsey Kovnat (After Dark Screening, USA)

Films about people’s devotion to their pets are rarely rewarding, and this is an especially uncompelling example of the form. I was also distracted the whole time by its use of a Prince song that it cannot possibly have the rights to.

Panic Switch

Cameron Red Howe (After Dark Screening, USA)

A fun stop-motion visualization of a high school teacher’s story slam performance, recounting student reactions to the teacher’s discovery of a bag of weed in the classroom.

The Bug Hotel

Mya Iannuzzi (After Dark Screening, USA)

An affable hotel clerk navigates the establishment’s various bizarre guests while trying to make a room service delivery. I didn’t really vibe with it, but I appreciated its mashup of 2-D animation and live action, lo-fi puppetry.

Butterfly Kiss

Zohar Dvir (Animated Shorts Block, Germany)

Insect metamorphosis as a metaphor for committing to relationship. Let love in or die. Really nicely done, and an interesting example of the length digital films will go to add artificial texture as a proxy for the tactile warmth of film grain.

Ducks

AJ Jefferies (Animated Shorts Block, UK)

A fun look at some ducks in a park, some of whom have conspicuously idiosyncratic physical features. It seems a conspiracy is afoot, and it might not end well. We are ultimately admonished to not feed bread to the ducks, but I still think it’s OK.

Jasmine

Adam Loomis (Animated Shorts Block, USA)

A man scrambles to replace the heat lamp bulb in his lizard’s habitat before realizing they can go outside and let the sun do its job. The final moments provide a nice catharsis; there’s something so pleasant and peaceful about the lizard enjoying the sun.

Gigi

Cynthia Calvi (Animated Shorts Block, France)

Absolutely gorgeous rendering of a trans woman’s path to self-discovery, beginning with her childhood obsession with The Little Mermaid and retaining that fishy metaphor throughout. The style looks so familiar, but I don’t believe I’ve seen any of Cynthia Calvi’s other films, so I think it’s reminding me of Kate Beaton’s comics, which is another plus.

Disabled: A Love Story

Sheila Sofian (Animated Shorts Block, USA)

A couple describes the ups and downs of living with MS over 27 years of marriage. A moving portrait of extraordinary sacrifice, though the husband/caregiver goes out of his way to make it clear he’s not a saint, he’s just lucky enough to have found the one person he would do this for.

Viscous

Bradford Andrew Pattullo (Animated Shorts Block, USA)

Some really great clay animation following red and blue communities of blob creatures on some distant planet. The creatures seem to be trying to move toward Saturn, and it’s fun to follow their viscous bodies and they respond to the terrain on their journey, but it ultimately doesn’t quite go anywhere.

SKRFF

Corrie Francis Parks, Daniel Nuderscher (Experimental Shorts Block, Austria)

A wall’s decades of graffiti are explored by rhythmically carving down through the many layers of paint. A great way to tell a non-linear story of such a specific time and place.

Air

Anna Firth (Experimental Shorts Block, USA)

A florid account of an artist residency, this film came and went without leaving much of an impression.

Carousel-57

Christopher Chidlow (Experimental Shorts Block, UK)

I guess this is meant to imagine some kind of found slide carousel, with various old photographs and footage from old films. I couldn’t get into it.

The World Said No

Jennie Thwing (Experimental Shorts Block, USA)

A somewhat sanctimonious saga of nature reclaiming the earth from humanity’s careless whims. It’s not like I’m not onboard with the message, but its delivery here left me cold.

The Shadow

Petra Balekić (Experimental Shorts Block, Croatia)

A woman’s body, superimposed on itself, alternately in accord and discord. It made me miss figure drawing!

Patch

Meg Cook (Experimental Shorts Block, USA)

A pretty simple collection of animated compositions of bright color made from cut and woven paper. Harmless, maybe a little too much so.

Story of Stories

Yijia Bao (Experimental Shorts Block, China)

Poetry and scribbles, clearly a labor of love, but it just didn’t interest me.

Deluge

Meejin Hong (Experimental Shorts Block, USA)

A growing collection of unrelated animated drawing cycles, some abstract and some representational, slowly builds until they’ve completely blacked out the screen. There’s so much to look at, and there’s something about how busy it is that keeps it from being truly mesmerizing, but I never got bored, and the sound design gives it an unexpected gravitas.

Pure Animation for Now People

Mark Neely (Music Video Showcase, USA)

A random assemblage of twee imagery channeling an aggressively analog aesthetic from the Schoolhouse Rock-ified ’70s, soundtracked by an equally twee little ditty from Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh. Sight and sound both feel like throwaway palate cleansers between the artists’ other projects.

Greg Weeks: If the Sun Dies

Mohe Pinkston (Music Video Showcase, USA)

Fluid animation, a great sense of line and composition, and images that feel at home with the music, and yet it doesn’t quite cohere for me, partly because the inclusion of the singer himself is jarring amid the otherwise congruent birds, flowers, and faceless nudes.

Intoner: Don’t Start to Ring

Devan Detwiler (Music Video Showcase, USA)

I like that this video really gets the kind of basement shows a band like Intoner plays, and its lo-fi aesthetic is appropriate, but the incredibly jerky frame rate (seriously, like 3 fps) feels perpetually out of sync with the music’s own rhythm, and it’s exasperating. I feel like an inordinate amount of films at this fest are trying to make an art of conspicuously dropped frames, and it can work, but most of the examples here just strike me as lazy.

Damnit Dina: I Won’t Change

Yasmina Serville (Music Video Showcase, USA)

The last video had too few frames, and this one has too many. Its initial stop-motion collage approach befits the song’s psych-pop vibe, but it’s an awkward juxtaposition with the more straight-ahead live-action performance footage that appears when the vocals kick in, and those two things are at odds with each other for the remainder of the song.

Donnie CoCo: Bad Word

Davey Levson, Dairies Escoto (Music Video Showcase, USA)

Music videos tend to take one of three forms: documentation of the musician(s) performing the song; a visual and/or conceptual interpretation of the song; or a short film that doesn’t really have anything to do with the song but the director decided to use this opportunity to make it. This one is of that last category, and it enlists very poorly constructed, animated, and composited puppets in some kind of pointless fable about loneliness.

Everymind Is Different

Nadya Girendroheru (Music Video Showcase, UK)

Maybe I’m giving the kids too much credit, but it’s hard for me to imagine the target audience for this well-meaning but painfully hokey PSA on neurodiversity not rolling their eyes.

Stay

Kam DeLa (Music Video Showcase, USA)

Corny R&B animated in the style of Peanuts.

The Savage Blush: Mapachtli

Joe Beblavy (Music Video Showcase, USA)

This guy knows how to do the psychedelic thing, and it mostly works, but its limited motifs have worn themselves out by the end.

Good Co.: Burnin’

Bernadine Van Renne (Music Video Showcase, Canada)

There doesn’t seem to be any organizing principle to this one, with the most common recurring element being animated photocopies of the band itself, who, it must be said, makes tolerable alt-country music but is not especially photogenic.

Concrete Caveman: Doused in Gasoline (Irony Poisoned)

Sean Clark, John Bussott (Music Video Showcase, USA)

It’s pretty mediocre grindcore, but the video, which shepherds the band’s transformation into flaming skeletons emerging from a volcano to decimate the populace, understands the brief.

You Play Too Much

Rob Shaw (Philly Showcase, USA)

A super fun animated comic strip about growing up in Philly in the ’80s, narrated by Fred Armisen. Fully assured in its tone, voice, rhythm, and unique visual style. Every frame pops with life.

Lil’ Robot Girl

Steven Vargas (Philly Showcase, USA)

I’m not sure I’ve seen anything so clearly inspired (directly or indirectly) by Ren & Stimpy since John Kricfalusi got #metoo’d awhile back.

Lil Kev, Episode 1: Take Your Kev to Work (Excerpt)

Musa Brooker (Philly Showcase, USA)

A pretty stock animated sitcom vehicle for a standup comedian (Kevin Hart in this case), which pales in comparison to You Play Too Much (see above), which has similar themes.

Crain Plaisy

Karl Staven (Philly Showcase, USA)

A deconstruction and reconstruction of Steamboat Willie, followed by a brief explanation of that film’s significance to copyright law, which probably would have done the job on its own. Somewhat conceptually reminiscent of Dana Sink’s superior Power.

Blot

Zachary Vickers (Philly Showcase, USA)

A document of the January 6th insurrection featuring watercolor-splotched newspaper images and headlines, soundtracked by police radio and fireworks. It’s sufficiently chilling but doesn’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said about the most well-documented event of the past five years.

Medusa Vs. The Men Who Want (Her) Head

Jennifer Marie Cella (Philly Showcase, USA)

A modern, transgender Medusa interviews a clown for a bachelorette party. It does not go well! Home Movies-esque. One of a number of films mining blurry SD video for a certain kind of nostalgia.

Death, Great Death

CX Timon (Philly Showcase, USA)

Another instance of sketchy poetry that couldn’t hold my attention.

Inn at Leeds

Jacob Rivkin (Philly Showcase, USA)

A simple and pleasant enough scene of people enjoying the water on a hot summer day, but honestly a pretty anticlimactic festival closer.