Beyond the Usual Suspects: Indie Animated Features Offer Refreshing Alternatives to Big Studio Spectacles

This article was written for the December '24 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 345).

We’re deep into autumn, and the time is ripe to appraise the year’s crop of animated features. As award season heaves into gear, films from the big studios are drawing attention; history tells us that the winners are likely to come from among them. But when we look past them, the full sweep of global animation comes into view. This year, a rich spread of international titles rides into the season on a wave of festival acclaim and strong word of mouth.

Let’s take a look at them.

‘As award season heaves into gear, films from the big studios are drawing attention; history tells us that the winners are likely to come from among them. But when we look past them, the full sweep of global animation comes into view.’

Academy voters may be familiar with Adam Elliot, who won an Oscar in 2004 for his short film Harvey Krumpet and is back with his second feature, Memoir of a Snail. Like all of the Australian director’s works, this one follows its hapless protagonists through a series of misfortunes. This is surely the year’s only film in any medium that addresses adoption, compulsive hoarding and conversion therapy. The tragedy is leavened with Elliot’s customary offbeat humor and moments of great warmth. The film is staged in his trademark stop-motion style, with its rough-hewn plasticine puppets and minimalist animation. Annecy’s jury was impressed, awarding it the Best Animated Feature Cristal.

Sublime Stop Motion

Elliot isn’t the year’s only returning stop-motion veteran. Almost a decade after his Oscar-nominated My Life as a Zucchini, Swiss filmmaker Claude Barras is back with his sophomore feature, Savages. Set in Borneo, the film depicts a clash between the island’s Indigenous Penan people and a palm oil company that is flattening the local forest; the tension between the two sides is embodied in 11-year-old protagonist Kéria, who is half Swiss and half Penan. As Kéria learns more about her family’s past, Savages develops its fiercely anticolonialist message, which is echoed in the bitterly ironic title.

Savages is a vivid example of a trend that’s growing, for obvious reasons, among animated films. Although ecological fables have long had a place in animation for both adults and children, explicit environmental messages are increasingly common, whether at the core of a story or on its periphery. Deforestation also features in Into the Wonderwoods, menacing the enchanted woods of the title, in which young Angelo gets lost on a trip to visit his grandma. But the French film is not a polemic, like Savages, so much as a flamboyant voyage-and-return fantasy, rendered in slickly cartoony CGI. Based on a comic book by Vincent Paronnaud (Persepolis), who directs here alongside industry veteran Alexis Ducord, Into the Wonderwoods captures Paronnaud’s absurdist comic sensibility while also evoking some of the zanier Hollywood features of recent years, such as the Trolls trilogy.

Apocalypse Meow

The climate crisis also haunts one of the most distinctive movies of the year, Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow, which won no fewer than four awards at Annecy, as well as the top prize at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. The ecological message here isn’t explicit — in this wordless quest, not much is — but the inciting incident is a great flood, which evokes current and future calamities as much as Noah’s Ark. The water drowns the film’s dreamlike world, which bears relics of human civilization but no humans — only animals. We follow a small black cat as it strives to survive, with the help of a growing posse of companions (including a dim Labrador and a lazy capybara). Though suitable for children, Flow is often meditative, with a mystical streak, much like Zilbalodis’ first feature, Away. The Latvian director’s unusual approach to CG film language, which involves a relatively free-moving camera, creates an exploratory mood that suits the zigzagging narrative.

Cats make versatile actors: Ghost Cat Anzu also features a feline protagonist but is otherwise utterly different from Flow in tone, style and story. (Full disclosure: I worked on the film as a production manager.) As a ghost cat, Anzu can talk and cannot die, but otherwise, he is very much of this world: a feckless gambling addict with a vulgar manner. When he is tasked with looking after an 11-year-old orphan who arrives in his sleepy coastal town, the scene is set for a gently absurdist mismatched-buddy caper. The 2D-rotoscoped production, directed by Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita, marks a rare collaboration between Japan (Shin-Ei Animation) and France (Miyu Productions, which handled the backgrounds and art direction).

Rotoscoping is also used in Rock Bottom, a portrait of the influential English musician Robert Wyatt and a passion project for its Spanish director, María Trénor. The narrative revolves around the creation of Wyatt’s eponymous album and the accident that left him paralyzed shortly before it was recorded. This is the mid-1970s, and the film channels the psychedelic subculture of the time through hallucinatory segments and heightened, saturated colors.

Rock Bottom comes in a context: Global indie animation has long been comfortable with historical and biographical subjects, including dark and delicate ones. Past wars have proved particularly fertile terrain in recent years. Take Shinnosuke Yakuwa’s Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window, a biographical retelling of the wartime childhood of Japanese media personality Tetsuko Kuroyanagi. The film, which won the Paul Grimault Award at Annecy, ties into a popular genre in anime: World War II dramas staged from the perspective of children.

Japan’s wartime experience also lurks in the backdrop to Kensuke’s Kingdom, a British adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s classic children’s novel. Tossed overboard while sailing with his family, a boy washes up on a tropical island with a single human resident: an old Japanese man harboring a difficult past. There is plenty of rich, fluid character animation in a classical style — little surprise from a film directed (with Kirk Hendry) by Neil Boyle, a brilliant animator who cut his teeth working with Richard Williams.

Powerful War Fable

A different theater of World War II provides the setting for The Most Precious of Cargoes, the animation debut of acclaimed French director Michel Hazanavicius (who won an Oscar for 2011’s The Artist), which mixes 2D and CG animation. An adaptation of Jean-Claude Grumberg’s novel of the same name, the film is a fable set against the backdrop of deportations to Auschwitz; it became the first animated feature to play in Cannes’ official competition since 2008’s Waltz With Bashir (another war drama, perhaps not coincidentally).

Shortly after the war, hundreds of miles to the west, a boy watched on entranced as his stepfather, dreaming of maritime adventures, built a boat in their garden outside Paris. Another seven decades later, the story of this surreal enterprise has been retold in A Boat in the Garden by Jean-François Laguionie, who was once that boy but is now an 85-year-old master of animation. The autobiographical drama is an affectionate study of a family that is poor at communication but rich in imagination: The boy is creative like the stepfather, except that he channels his energies into drawing. But it is also a richly detailed portrait of suburban France in the early 1950s, rendered in a classical illustrative 2D style (with CG animation) that only occasionally hints at the Fauvism of earlier works by Laguionie.

The films mentioned above come from countries that are well established on the global animation scene. But one of the most exciting tendencies in recent years is the growing prominence of features and filmmakers from less-recognized regions. Two such works from 2024 come to mind. The first is Rhythm of a Flower, by the Indian filmmaker Amit Dutta, which takes the life of classical singer Kumar Gandharva as a starting point for an ethereal meditation on the forms and poetry of traditional music from Dutta’s country. The second is Olivia & the Clouds, the debut feature from Dominican director and animator Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat, which ranges effortlessly between styles and techniques as it weaves a tapestry of magical-realist tales around a group of recurring characters. These two films are sensuous, engrossing and formally inventive, and remind us that the animation landscape is truly growing more international by the year.

Alex Dudok de Wit is an animation journalist, consultant and festival programmer. He is the author of the BFI Film Classics book on Grave of the Fireflies and translator of Hayao Miyazaki’s manga Shuna’s Journey.