I have started choosing my selections for Annecy International Animated Film Festival that I'll be attending in France in LESS THAN A MONTH (awesome!). There are some really awesome looking collections of short films, and in particular there is one containing a production by the National Film Board of Canada. It sounds pretty cool and sorta in the same style as "Ryan" another film by the NFB that won an Oscar a couple years back. One of the other collections has a cool sounding short by Aardman, one that sounds fairly mature. I love seeing animated work targeted at adults so I can't wait to go to this.

There are also going to be a bunch of feature films competing, plus they are showing "sneak peeks" of "Shrek 3" and "Meet the Robinsons." These movies will have been out for a while here by then, but I guess they might have a delayed release schedule in Europe. Anyway, I'll probably at least see Shrek 3 there. I still need to spend some time to pick out a feature film to see that is a bit less mainstream.

The cool thing about film festivals is the chance to see stuff that may never be shown or distributed again. In many cases the reason is that the stuff isn't very good, but you never know. Mass market decisions are based on ideas of profitability, and not all good movies are suited to making lots of money. So sometimes they get lost and end up not being released to wider audiences. So it's important to try out some lesser known stuff and also just completely random stuff because you'll never know what you'll find.

This is going to be awesome!