The Viborg Animation Festival is kicking off in just under a month, bringing a week of exciting, engaging events to the central Jutland city. The 2017 edition, running Sept. 25 to Oct. 1, will celebrate 150 years of diplomatic relations between Denmark and Japan with the theme “Kawaii & Epikku” and programs exploring the importance of animation in these disparate but connected cultures.
Japanese classics as well as recent international favorites will screen, from a Studio Ghibli marathon, to Polygon Pictures’ sci-fi Netflix Original Blame!, to Makoto Shinkai’s three-time Japan Academy Prize-winner Your Name. and Sunao Katabuchi’s powerful WWII picture In This Corner of the World (in limited US release now). There will also be a Manga Artist Battle, the Viborg Manga and Anime Museum — featuring pieces from the Kyoto Seika University collection and Kyoto International Manga Museum — and a seminar with Japanese and Western artists on “Manga and Comics: Inspiration and Isolation.”
Additional highlights include a unique live experience, Solar Walk, which combines animation by award-winning director Réka Bucsi with music from composer Niels Marthinsen, jazz singer Susi Hyldgaard and the Aarhus Jazz Orchestra to create an interdisciplinary artistic journey into the puzzling, immense solar system. Uri Kranot’s award-winning VR short Nothing Happens will feature in the Expanded Animation Art Spaces exhibitions, which explore the borders between technology, animation and installation art. And fan art by Danish cartoonists will bring color to the walls at the VAF Sum-Up exhibitions.
Animation professionals can also look forward to a number of informative conferences, focused on new ways to utilize these artistic and technological skills in the healthcare, science and education fields.
More information at http://animationsfestival.dk.
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