Animafest Zagreb 2021: 5 Short Films To Look Out For This Year
Animafest Zagreb, the world’s second-oldest animation festival, is gearing up to hold its 2021 edition in the Croatian capital on June 7–12. If it goes ahead, Animafest will have pulled off a rare feat: holding fully in-person events in both years of the pandemic (last year’s was delayed to the fall).
Covid or no Covid, Animafest has selected a fine crop of shorts for this year’s competition. The 112 films are split across three categories: the grand competition, the student competition, and the Croatian competition.
We’ve combed the line-up and picked out five notable shorts, from up-and-coming filmmakers and established pros alike. Watch the trailers below, then read more about this year’s program here.
Over the Moon and
The Willoughbys, both of which have fallen out of the race. So has the sixth longlisted film, Dreamworks Animation’s
The Croods: A New Age.
In recent years, Disney hasn’t dominated this category as decisively as at the Oscars or Golden Globes: it has won the BAFTA in two of the last six years. But this is the first time since 2014 that it has accounted for the majority of the nominees, and
Soul, fresh from winning at the Globes, goes into this award as the favorite. The film has picked up two additional nominations, for best original score and best sound.
Rocks, and
The Father lead this year’s nominations, with two women Chloé Zhao and Sarah Gavron nabbing seven nominations each. Four women total earned nods for directing compared to last year’s all-male directing nominees, and in a reversal from last year’s entirely white acting nominees, 16 of 2021 s 24 nominated actors are from underrepresented groups.
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Deadline, the changes come as the result of a seven-month review process (HFPA better be taking some copious notes), in which the organization evaluated its procedures and implemented some changes, “including the introduction of a long-list system in a bid to increase viewership of all the submitted films, and increasing all four acting categories and the best director category to six nominees.” A total of 50 films (up from last year’s 39) were nominated this year, and the changes additionally resulted in more first-time nominees than ever before: Four of the six directors nominated, as well as 21 of th