Michel Gondry to Receive Annecy Honorary Cristal as Special Guest of the Fest

Visionary filmmaker Michel Gondry will be attending the Annecy International Animation Film Festival for the first time, honored as a special guest of the 2025 edition (June 8-14). In addition to his high profile live-action feature films, Gondry has created visually explorative animated works and transformative work in music videos (a featured focus of this year’s Annecy Fest) for artists like Björk, The White Stripes, Steriogram and Daft Punk.

“Michel Gondry assumes the legacy of Georges Méliès as much as that of Norman McLaren,” said Marcel Jean, Annecy Festival’s Artistic Delegate. “His boundless creativity and innovative approach have brought hand-crafted animation back into the mainstream, as brilliantly illustrated by The Science of Sleep.”

Popularly known for his cult hit Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for which Gondry shared an Academy Award for Original Screenplay with Charlie Kaufman and Pierre Bismuth as well as many other accolades, Gondry made a splash in the animation world when Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?: An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky was awarded the Prix André-Martin for best French animated feature in 2014, though he did not attend Annecy that year.

The 2025 edition of the Festival will offer a journey to the heart of Gondry’s creative process for his new paper cut-out animated feature Maya, donne-moi un titre (Maya, Give Me a Title). Inspired by the creative ways that the director and his daughter maintained a long-distance bond through animation, the film made its debut in France in October and will have its international premiere at Berlinale next month before making its way to the French Alps.