LA Shorts International Film Festival is a prestigious “Academy Awards® Qualifying” festival for animation so I was excited to be included in the program. After experiencing the size of the festival (550 short films) first-hand it is amazing how well it runs. But the size of the festival is also its biggest problem. There just weren’t that many “great” films to justify their place in the programming and many of the programs I attended were tedious to sit through. I understand that preference in movies is subjective, and it’s not my place to question selections, but I do think the quality of the festival would be better if they could cut the number of films.

  My personal issue with the festival is the animation portion. There was one dedicated “Animation Block” which showed 17-18 animated films and if you were to watch that program, you would be led to believe that those were ALL the animations that were in the festival. However, as someone who was not in that program, I can say that there were many other animated shorts that were simply shuffled into the live-action programs and never really got the attention that an “Academy Awards® Qualifying” festival for animation should have provided for them. Furthermore, several of the films I had already seen either online or on a streaming service which I believe is a violation of the “Premiere Status” rule that the festival was so strict about.

So, that left me wondering why I wasn’t included as part of the “Animation Block” since my film is 100% keyframed 3D animation. I believe the answer was in the question. There were NO 3D animated shorts in the Animation Block, at least none that weren’t stylized in some way. The rest of the films were either hand drawn or stop-motion, which are always interesting to see, but overall only half of those animations were the level of quality I was expecting and the inclusion of some of them can best be described as extremely generous.

I should mention there were other 3D-looking animations, but they, like mine, were all placed in “live action” programs to fend for themselves. Mine, specifically, was placed with some overly dramatic post-apocalyptic shorts where “Nubbinwood” seemed out-of-place. I did get to see my film on a big screen, which was exciting, but other than that, my personal experience with the LA Shorts International Film Festival was disappointing. 

The winner of the festival was a 2D/3D hybrid movie where the 3D parts were rendered to look like 2D animation. Although it wasn’t personally my favorite of the program, its technical proficiency was well deserving of the win when compared to many of the other films.