In the early nineties, right after finishing my Fine Arts degree, Carolina López Caballero (Villafranca de los Caballeros, Toledo, 1966) went to England to study animation. There he discovered the depth and richness of international animated cinema and directed a short film, Swan song, which was screened at the London Film Festival alongside the legendary Comfort creatures by Nick Park, co-founder of Aardman. Upon returning to Barcelona, ​​seeing the disparity between the English and Catalan animation scenes, she took advantage of a screening of her short film at the Generalitat's film department to hand over a thick dossier to the officials with a project to create an animation festival in Catalonia. "Back then, there were animation festivals in England, Channel Four, BBC2... But it was a desert, and I, besides being a creator, have always had a desire to share," explains López Caballero.

When we think of childhood as a lost paradise, we likely have in mind an idealized period that roughly spans from ages five to eleven. Our memories don't extend beyond that because, generally, our recollection of the first years of life tends to be a hazy patchwork of vague impressions. Little Amélie, However, he does not choose this path. This adaptation of Metaphysics of Tubes Amélie Nothomb's novel takes the autobiographical foundation of her early memories (she was born and lived with her family in Japan until the age of three) and uses it to create an animated Eden.

The Little Pot It continues to grow. The family music group led by Helena Bagué and Siddhartha Vargas, whose songs have amassed over 200 million views on YouTube and more than 120,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, makes its debut this Friday in a field they haven't yet explored: film. They're doing so with an original song. The spirit of Christmas, the main theme of the Catalan animated film Hanna and the Forgotten Christmas, by Elena Ruiz, a sequel to the 2023 film Hanna and the Monsterswhich was nominated for both the Gaudí and Goya awards. "We had already received some similar proposals, but this one finally convinced us because of the project and its values, which aligned with those of El Pot Petit," explains Vargas. The fact that the theme was Christmas was an added bonus for Bagué, who admits to being "a huge fan" of Christmas songs.

Zootopia 2 load with a weight that the first part It lacked the need to live up to that wonderful, unexpected, and monstrous Disney production; not just for visual grandiosity—though that too—but for narrative ingenuity. That relentless script, stringing gag after gag and daring to address prejudice without patronizing, remains the inevitable point of comparison. The sequel, in a very respectable decision, tones down the festive tone to offer a more mature reading: where there was once euphoria, there is now prudence.

Wow, what a shock Netflix's 2025 animation crop makes. After excellent feature films like the new one from Wallace & Gromit or the phenomenon The K-pop warriors and such successful series as Devil May Cry and Asterix and Obelix: The Boss Fight, they only needed to finish paying it with a clumsiness like DisarrayThis animated comedy for adults, and very much for adults, also comes with an author's signature: that of the great Genndy Tartakovsky, creator of, among others,Dexter's Laboratory and Samurai Jack and director of The Powerpuff Girls, Star Wars: Clone Wars and Hotel Transylvania. Aristocracy of the cartoon.

During World War II, a poor lumberjack adopts a Jewish girl who has just been thrown by her father from the train deporting the entire family to Auschwitz. Michel Hazanavicius's first animated film strives to strike a precarious balance between the horror of what it's depicting and the fairy-tale tone of the story, aiming to vindicate love and solidarity as intrinsically human qualities. As is typical in the director's work, The artist, is a film with better intentions than results. Despite expressive and deliberately pumiceous 2D animation and some memorable characters (the disfigured-faced ex-soldier who takes in the mother and child), the film cannot avoid, especially in the final stretch, indulging in a sentimentality underscored by Alexandre Desplat's ever-present score.

This season, animated films have been marked by the Latvian mix starring in Flow, who without any mention of me ended up taking home the Oscar. But we should start making room for another cat, the one that gives its name to Anzu, ghost cat: a huge, laughing, flatulent anthropomorphic feline who lives in a small town on the Japanese coast and almost always travels by motorcycle. The only person surprised by the presence of this beast is Karin, a teenager who, disliked by her father, leaves her in the care of her grandfather while he looks for a way to pay off his gambling debts. After the initial shock, Karin befriends Anzu, with whom she spends time during the long summer days and with whom she ends up taking a trip to the underworld in search of her mother, who died a few years before.

Marathons are not made for sprinters. Or to put it another way: the feature-length format is not the ideal distance for animation sprinters, who are used to cramming all their inventiveness and humor into a short 5- or 6-minute TV film. Perhaps that is why the film titles of Warner Bros.' legendary animated franchise often mixed live action and animation, such as Space Jam. But The Day the Earth Exploded - A Looney Tunes Movie No: It is the first fully animated theatrical film about these mythical characters and, precisely for that reason, it suffers the most from its pacing.

Javier Mariscal (Valencia, 1950) can't quite process the fact that the Animac Festival in Lleida has awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award, which he will collect this Sunday at the closing ceremony. "I'm not an animator," he excuses himself, "I'm nothing!" And yet, he has done everything: comics, textiles, sculptures, paintings and designed everything from venues to Olympic mascots... But he hasn't always been welcomed with open arms. "Miquel Barceló told me not to paint, that my comics were the best. My comics were the best."The Viper The same: "What beautiful furniture you make." Oscar Tusquets told me: "Don't make furniture, your paintings are very beautiful." The art world didn't forgive me for having works at 30,000 euros in a gallery and then selling them at a newsstand. And thank goodness I didn't win the Oscar with Chico & Rita or the animators would have shot me."

The last few weeks have not been easy for you. Michel Gondry. After having filmed a musical based on Pharrell Williams' childhood, Golden, one of the most anticipated releases of 2025, Variety revealed a few days ago that the editing had been cancelled and the film would never be released because the producers and Gondry considered that the material was not up to expectations. To dry the sorrows of such an ambitious and frustrated project, there is nothing better than to present another one at the antipodes: Maya, give me a title, a long animated film that collects the animated shorts stop motion that Gondry has been making for years for his daughter Maya, hand-animated pieces with colored cardboard, scissors, adhesive tape and a smartphone. The French director introduced him to the press at the Berlinale, although he did not accept "questions about Pharrell".