Annecy 2010

Paul Driessen and myself

Ron Diamond, Matt Groening, David Silverman and Serge Bromberg

Matt Groening, me and David Silverman

Day one

Tuesday 8^th June 2010

After the usual unpleasant scrum of getting through Bristol airport at 6am I finally arrived in Annecy just in time to hook up for lunch with Nick Park and Angie Last from Aardman. Nick has very kindly agreed to renew his official patronage for Animated Encounters and is going to help by requesting original artwork from other animators to help with much needed fundraising for the festival (more to follow in the coming months).

Met up with Portugal’s finest woman animator Regina Pessoa and the magnificent Paul Driessen (multi-award winning and Oscar nominated Dutch animator) who kindly invited me to join them for the official opening of the ‘Creators and Creatures’ exhibition up at the Castle (Chateau).

The Annecy Chateau is one of the most picturesque medieval buildings in France (dating back to 13^th Century in parts). Each year it hosts an animation exhibition and Maurice Corbet’s ‘Creators and Creatures’ exhibition is a perfect complement to the 50^th Anniversary of the festival. The exhibition is truly a ‘who’s who’ of all the great and the good of the animation world over the last 50 years. It was great to see so many familiar faces from Annecy in old(ish!) photos looking so youthful – some of them still do, sort of, it has to be said (politely).

Luckily I bumped into my old friend Matt Groening – creator of The Simpsons. Matt visited Bristol back in 2002 and was Animated Encounters’ VIP guest for the ‘Desert Island Flicks’ session. Also met David Silverman – Supervising Animation Director from The Simpsons Movie, Ron Diamond – President, Co-Founder/Co-Publisher at Animation World Network, President/Executive Producer at Acme Filmworks, Inc. and Serge Bromberg – Artistic Director of the Annecy festival. Managed to take a couple of pics with these guys. Matt’s son, Abe, was also there and it was a great pleasure to meet him also.

Not bad networking for day one I suppose and I make no apologies for my shameless name-dropping!!