We like reading up on animation festivals because more often than not you can find several of the winning short films online already. Ottawa International Animation Festival is North America’s premier showcase for animation, and having wrapped up at the end of October has proven itself no exception—some of its excellent winners are already up on the web.

The top dog is sadly unavailable as the Grand Prize for Best Short Film award went to David O’Reilly’s The External World, for which there isn’t even a trailer yet. O’Reilly has put himself on the map now in a big way through his unique approach to narrative storytelling. Earlier in the year we were quite taken by his previous effort, Please Say Something when it showed up for Sundance. The External World will be on the radar for sure.

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Of the winners that ARE available, we first have Best Narrative Short Film, which in a surprise went to Ray Lei for This is Love. Ray Lei is a future superstar, supremely popular in his native China and getting plenty of Western love as well. For the best overview of his work there is a nice feature on him at Intel and Vice magazine’s cool culture website, Creator Project. The beautiful and intricate formalism of This is Love bizarrely reminds me of Chris Ware’s comic works, however there is a lot else going on, and his Chinese roots also shine as he filters through a well curated collage of styles and eras. The result is supremely fun and fresh looking. However I say that Lei’s win for Best Narrative Short was a surprise because This is Love is a short short at under 3min, and is a not very substantial well…narratively. Cartoon Brew’s Amid was a juror at Ottawa in 2009 and got to see 3 of Lei’s student works. He sums up my thoughts on this effort by Lei perfectly when he writes, “all of us on the jury had a similar (and curious) reaction in that we admired his work and thought it was creative, but didn’t particularly like the films.” Maybe Ottawa, recognizing the bright path Ray Lei is on, jumped the gun a bit in honoring him.

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Best Commissioned Short Film naturally is up as well. The jury awarded Andersen M Studio, the home of Martin and Line Andersen, for their piece Going West, commissioned by the New Zealand Book Council. Ian at Animation Blog had a nice little write-up earlier in the year. The 2 minute film is a beautiful piece—a narrator reads an excerpt from Maurice Gee’s same-titled book, while intricately fashioned cutouts emerge from the pages to dramatize the reading.  It’s a cool and trippy little ride, and superficially reminds me of another commissioned short I like, This Is Where We Live, where books themselves become the raw material for manipulation. The downside is that the reading itself is of poor audio quality, making the discernment of what is being said difficult.

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The only twice-awarded effort of the festival was Dustin Grella’s Prayers for Peace, which took home its category, Best Graduate Student Short Film,  but also landed the The Walt Disney Animation Studios GRAND PRIZE for Best Student Animation as well. The moving short, narrated by Grella himself, recounts his personal journey in coming to terms with his younger brother’s death—who, as a fresh-faced soldier, was serving in Iraq. The medium is chalk on slate, constantly morphing and leaving remnants of each prior image behind,  which beautifully accentuates the themes of the short—the indeterminacy of Grella’s understanding regarding his brother’s final months, as well the residual imprint of memory as it fades over time.  A bravura piece for sure. Stylistically it will remind you of work like the pinscreen masterpiece Mindscape, or the oil-paint on glass technique of Aleksandr Petrov, but it is as a personal confession that the weight of the film registers.

All three of the above winners are pretty short and display immense technical mastery, so even if one isn’t overwhelmed by the stories, you should take a look.