Below, we share with you a note from Animateka's Programme Director, Igor Prassel, and invite you to browse through this year's programme on our website https://www.animateka.si/2025/en/.

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Animateka—Giving space to good animation for 22 years

The Animateka festival is an active member of the Animation Festival Network (AFN), a union coordinated by Animafest Zagreb, which also comprises Anim'est (Romania), Fest Anča (Slovakia), and Anifilm (Czechia). EU funding has enabled us to undertake an array of activities aimed at strengthening our cooperation, including the transition to Filmchief, a new cloud-based festival management platform that offers everything you need to organise a film festival. By developing specific film programmes and making screenings accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, and to the blind and partially-sighted, the AFN members have started to engage firmly in a sustainable transition to a green future and inclusive cinema—among our other key areas. Due to space limitations, the Animateka festival is unable to expand in terms of content, so we still hope that Kinodvor's art cinema miniplex will see the light of film projectors sometime soon. Due to the specific nature of our competition programmes, we had to select from “only” 1,000 submissions this year, but I am nevertheless pleased that the selection team is growing year by year. Three heads are better than two. As every year, the works in the line-up of animated films from Central and Eastern Europe—due to the increasing length of short films, we had to add a fifth competition programme—will be judged by a star-studded jury from four continents.

Animated feature films are becoming increasingly diverse in theme and style. It is also encouraging to see more and more of them in distribution throughout the year, and not just those intended for children. Of the eight films premiering this year, as many as five will find their way into Slovenian cinemas after the festival. We look forward to welcoming Japan-born, France-based author Momoko Seto, who will present her feature debut, Dandelion's Odyssey. Using macro photography, hyper-slow motion, and time-lapse footage, the filmmaker has woven a gentle tale of the resurrection of four dandelion seeds after the apocalypse. 

After a series of highly acclaimed short films, Alberto Vázquez, an old acquaintance from Galicia, Spain, embarked on the long journey of making a feature-length debut. Titled Decorado, this superbly drawn and animated surrealist tale featuring anthropomorphic animals is brimming with black humour and references to the end of the world at the hands of neoliberal capitalism. At just forty-something years of age, Quebec director, screenwriter, and animator Félix Dufour-Laperrière already has five animated feature films under his belt. The latest, Death Does Not Exist, focuses on a group of young militant anarcho-activists and their questioning of the legitimacy of violent revolution, the rationality of class warfare, and the importance of political engagement. The recently tragically deceased Mexican avant-garde artist Aria Covamonas bid farewell with an independent Dadaist feature-length cut-out animation, The Great History of Western Philosophy. The chaotic story catapults us into the world of Western and Eastern philosophy, mythology, art history, pop culture, and stream-of-consciousness dream states. Another debut will screen at Animateka before hitting cinemas. The 2025 Annecy winner, Arco is both a family film and a dystopian science-fiction adventure, directed and written by young French illustrator, animator, and comic book artist Ugo Bienvenu. As part of Kinodvor's Rendez-Vouz with Coffee and Talk series, we are screening the latest masterpiece by French director Sylvain Chomet, A Magnificent Life, an animated biography of French writer, theatre and film director Marcel Pagnol.

Of all the Animateka retrospectives to date, this year's was the easiest to organise. It was put together in close collaboration with Jean-Baptiste Garnero and Sophie Le Tétour of the CNC, France, which is also the institution behind the renaissance of this obsolete animation technique. Although few films have been made using the pinscreen animation technique, we had to work hard to find them all. The technique was invented almost 100 years ago by Russian-French artist Alexandre Alexeïeff and his partner Claire Parker. Alexeïeff and Parker believed that the absence of shading and modelling meant that traditional hand-drawn animations were limited to comic or satirical effects. The pinscreen, however, produces a single image capable of infinite modification, and contains ‘all the finesses of tone and shading’. On top of this, according to Alexeïeff, the shades created by the pinscreen are more precise than any obtainable in painting, engraving or drawing. One could even go so far as to say that the result obtained when using a pinscreen is the predecessor of the digital pixel. To complement the retrospective, an exhibition entitled Shadow Tamers: On the art of the pinscreen, dedicated to Canadian animator Jacques Drouin, will be on view at the Slovenian Cinematheque.

At the Slovenian Cinematheque's new exhibition space, you can see an exhibition that takes you behind the scenes of the making of Tales from the Magic Garden, an animated feature collaboration among producers and filmmakers from Slovenia, France, Czechia, and Slovakia. Taking you through the entire creative process of the film’s making, the display reveals the techniques, phases, and tricks of puppet animation. Meanwhile, a new line-up of immersive works showcase the power of VR and MR storytelling in an exhibit on view in our new location, the Cirkulacija 2 art space. Come and explore playful escapes and deeply moving journeys into memory and healing—experiences only possible through the language of virtual reality.

Festival mornings are traditionally spent at the Old Power Station, where we talk with the filmmakers behind this year's films and learn about animation and life in masterclasses led by our esteemed guests as part of AnimatekaPRO.

At the festival opening, we remember the victims of genocide in Palestine and, above all, our colleagues who provide art therapy for Palestinian children through animation workshops. We support ‘To Gaza with Love: A Global Anijam,’ a project launched in 2025 by the Animators for Palestine community, and invite you to donate whatever you can.

 

We are dedicating the 22nd edition of Animateka to the late British filmmaker and writer Phil Mulloy, who visited us back in 2007. His films will remain with us forever, and through them, we will always remember him.

Igor Prassel

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This year’s festival trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq8Fx4p8ecY&t=2s

Trailer for Elephant family programme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83yAk-VqiVw