Armchair Travels With Screen-Worthy Children
“Zarafa,” from France, is one of the movies in the New York International Children’s Film Festival. More Photos »
By LAUREL GRAEBER
Published: February 28, 2013
Maki, a 10-year-old African boy, escapes the shackles of slave traders
and flees through the desert, where his fate becomes entwined with that
of an orphaned giraffe. Mei, 13, witnessing her parents’ disintegrating
marriage, runs away to the mountains with a tormented boy from her
class. Celestine, an artistic mouse, abandons her fellow rodents who
live underground and goes to dwell with a member of an enemy species:
Ernest, a bear.
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These are among the many voyages, inner and outer, in the New York International Children’s Film Festival,
which starts Friday and runs through March 24 in seven theaters in
Manhattan. Showcasing about 100 titles from 35 countries — chosen from
3,500 entries — the annual festival also takes young audiences on a
radical journey: away from superhero spectacles and good-versus-evil
showdowns and into a world of character-driven stories, painterly
animation and resolutions that aren’t always tidy.
The festival tries “to push and expand the boundaries” of children’s
film and “maybe defy expectations,” said Eric Beckman, its director, who
founded it in 1997 with his wife, Emily Shapiro. “Or at least it will
defy the parents’ expectations, because I think children are really open
to a wide range of things.”
This year that variety will reach a bigger audience. Although the
festival showcases films from its archives regularly at the IFC Center
in Greenwich Village and in other cities, and its parent organization,
Gkids, has become a theatrical distributor, the festival’s annual
competition has been limited to New York. But next month will bring the
debuts of the Los Angeles International Children’s Film Festival and the
Boston International Children’s Film Festival, with San Francisco and
Miami to follow in the fall.
Those cities’ programs will be shorter but will have the flavor of the New York event, which ranges from “Meet the Small Potatoes,”
the American animator Josh Selig’s mockumentary about a pop band of
enterprising spuds (screening Saturday, with an appearance by Mr.
Selig), to the American premiere of “Approved for Adoption,”
a subtitled French, Belgian and Swiss documentary. While Mr. Beckman
described “Small Potatoes” in an interview as “ ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ for
toddlers,” he called “Approved” “an adult film primarily.”
“I don’t think any other children’s film festivals will play it,” he
said. Yet “Approved” has a compelling theme for the young: the identity
issues arising from adoption. Directed by Laurent Boileau and Jung
Henin, it uses Mr. Henin’s hand-drawn animation and Super 8 family films
to tell his experiences as a Korean with Belgian parents.
“You do find some surprising, mature subjects,” the director Gus Van
Sant said of the festival in a telephone interview. For several years
he’s been one of its jury’s more than a dozen members, along with the
Oscar-winning animator John Canemaker and the French filmmaker Michel
Ocelot, whose latest 3-D animated feature of African fables, “Kirikou and the Men and the Women,”
is part of this year’s slate. (The jury awards prizes to short films
only — the best animated and the best live action — which then become
eligible for Academy Award consideration; audience members vote for the
festival’s grand-prize feature and short.)
Mr. Van Sant said he saw similarities to festivals like Sundance in the
films’ devotion to “blazing new territory.” This year’s “Flicker
Lounge,” a shorts program for teenagers, includes Julia Ducournau’s
live-action French film “Junior,” about a girl’s frightening transformation, while the aptly named program “Heebie Jeebies” offers Joni Mannisto’s “Swarming,” Finnish animation that’s creepy-crawly in every sense.
Feature-length animation, which Mr. Beckman sees as the greatest
strength of this year’s festival, kicks off the event on Friday with the
American premiere of “Ernest & Celestine,”
a French and Belgian celebration of nonconformity that just won a César
Award for best animated film. (Benjamin Renner, one of its three
directors, will attend the opening.) As the mouse Celestine paints, her
work takes shape in animation that flows like watercolors.
Vikram Veturi’s “Hey Krishna,”
having its American premiere on Sunday, brings digital technology and
Bollywood style to a Hindu god’s biography. The French film “Zarafa,”
directed by Rémi Bezançon and Jean-Christophe Lie, follows the escaped
boy and his beloved giraffe with lush, hand-drawn imagery. Mr. Beckman
is also showing one Disney hit, but in an unexpected way: “¡Rompe
Ralph!,” Rich Moore’s “Wreck-It Ralph” in Spanish (with subtitles),
introduces a festival section for Spanish-speaking audiences.
The festival is “giving children and the adults that go with them a
better idea of how protean animation is,” Charles Solomon, an animation
critic and historian, said in a telephone interview. He also credited it
with broadening the audience for Japanese animation: Offerings this
year include “Wolf Children,”
about the unruly offspring of a woman and a werewolf, directed by
Mamoru Hosoda (“Summer Wars”), who will appear at one of the screenings,
and “From Up on Poppy Hill,”
by the renowned Studio Ghibli (“Spirited Away”). The first feature
collaboration between the director Goro Miyazaki and his father, the
groundbreaking animator Hayao Miyazaki, “Poppy Hill” combines poignancy
and humor in chronicling a budding adolescent romance in Yokohama in
1963. Filled with vintage Japanese pop, the film captures the growing
pains of both its characters and the postwar nation.
The festival also has variety in its live-action slate. Vincent Bal’s Belgian and Dutch caper “The Zigzag Kid,”
having its American premiere on Saturday, follows a boy on a wild ride
to solve a criminal mystery and unravel his own past — all in time for
his bar mitzvah. Tom Shu-yu Lin’s much darker “Starry Starry Night,”
from Taiwan and showing on Sunday in the festival’s “Girls’ POV”
program, follows the disaffected teenager Mei into a fantasy world
populated by huge origami animals.