The Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) celebrated its 50th anniversary in grand style, providing four full days (the fifth and final day is tomorrow) of animated screenings, talks, and Bourbon-less (two years running now) drinking establishments (oh, that’s still because of the tarrifs, aye) culminating with tonight’s awards ceremony at the National Arts Centre. With Joel Frenzer / Evelyn Lambart’s Owl-acle dispensing sage wisdom (or something close) to start the show, and festival director Chris Robinson’s heartfelt words of wisdom – and thanks – sending us off to the party, the closing ceremony perfectly capped this year’s competitions with awards across all manner of film styles, stories, and impacts.
Kohei Kadowaki’s We Are Aliens took home the Grand Prize for Feature Animation, while Joe Hsieh’s Praying Mantis was awarded the Grand Prize for Short Animation. The festival concludes tomorrow, September 27.
Ball Face, Montreal animator Laurence Thérien’s clay-animated short about a kid’s awkward, anxious struggle to fit in, became the first film in OIAF history to take four awards in a single year. The student film won the Public Prize, the Canadian Student Award, the Bento Box Award for Best Student Animation and the Hélène Tanguay Award for Humour.
Kadowaki wrote and directed We Are Aliens, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight (Quinzaine des Cinéastes) at Cannes. The feature jury praised the film’s twisted sense of humor, its animation and the sensitivity it gives characters caught in the traps of everyday life.
Hsieh’s Praying Mantis, which explores the depths of maternal instinct, is now eligible for Academy Award consideration in the animated short category with its OIAF win.
Other winners include Julie Charette’s La comète (The Comet), which took the Canada Media Fund Award for Best Canadian Animation, and Don Hertzfeldt’s Paper Trail, which won Best Sound Design. Adult Swim’s The Elephant, an anijam whose directors include Pendleton Ward, Rebecca Sugar, Ian Jones-Quartey and Patrick McHale, won the Platform Animation competition, which replaced the festival’s Animated Series competition this year.
This year’s all-Canadian jury included Luc Chamberland, Lillian Chan and Alisi Telengut on features, and Dave Cooper, Barry Doupé and Alexandra Myotte on shorts. A Kids Jury of Ottawa-area children ages eight to 12 chose the Young Audiences 7+ winners, while the Teen Audiences 13+ prize was decided by a teen public vote.
Ottawa scrap metal artist Tick Tock Tom once again designed the award statues; each is a working phénakisticope carrying an animation by New York artist George Griffin.
OIAF returns September 24-28, 2027, for its 51st edition, with a poster designed by Sun Xun, whose woodcut and ink feature Magic Atlas received an honorable mention in this year’s feature competition.
The complete list of winners is as follows:
Grand Prize for Short Animation
Winner: Praying Mantis (dir. Joe Hsieh)
Jury Comment: For its ability to take us into the selfless depths of maternal instincts using sharp metaphorical imagery, fully realized internal logic, and purposeful, powerful touches of violence.
Grand Prize for Animated Feature
Winner: We Are Aliens (dir. Kohei Kadowaki)
Jury Comment: For its skillful capture of the incredible drama and absurdity of life. With a twisted sense of humor, where coincidences and silly entanglements gradually reveal themselves as simple but painful misunderstandings, this film is about many seemingly ordinary stories that happen to us and around us all the time, but usually go unnoticed. Different points of view, with inventive mise-en-scène, and poetic perspectives make us see familiar uneventful things in a new light. Presented as a series of everyday tableaux, these moments have a poetic musicality that suddenly bursts with dark or wonderful meaning, leaving us to imagine all the possible fates that are part of our everyday life. The animation and the sensitivity given to the characters caught in the traps of life are truly remarkable. A feast for the eyes and the senses.
Honorable Mention: Magic Atlas (dir. Sun Xun)
Jury Comment: For its extraordinary craftsmanship, made frame by frame with woodcut animation and ink painting, this animated feature has remarkable visual richness and texture. Its unconventional narrative unfolds through layers of metaphor. It tells a political fable, and it ends with a spiritual outlook. We admire the director’s courage in using animation to criticize dictatorship and other forms of authoritarian power.
Honorable Mention: Tangles (dir. Leah Nelson)
Jury Comment: For its exploration of an experience that, while deeply personal to some, carries a universal resonance for us all. This film is about love, loss, and the enduring connections that shape our lives. Funny, heartfelt, and ultimately heartbreaking, the film stayed with us. We were blown away by its beautiful animation, emotional depth, and cinematic execution.
Public Prize
Winner: Ball Face (dir. Laurence Thérien)
The Canada Media Fund Award for Best Canadian Animation
Winner: La comète (The Comet) (dir. Julie Charette)
Comment: For its understated, perceptive storytelling and its intelligent depiction of the sometimes painful processes of growing up.
Honorable Mention: Bisou Sauvage (dir. Bahji Jaroudi)
Comment: For its arresting animation and its wicked, incisive sense of humor about modern times.
Honorable Mention: Knowing Gaze (dir. Dylan Glynn)
Comment: For its vibrant animation style and its witty take on complex contemporary issues of identity.
Hélène Tanguay Award for Humour
Winner: Ball Face (dir. Laurence Thérien)
Comment: There were many contenders, but few films made us laugh quite as much while repeatedly smashing a child in the face with a ball. What begins as the familiar nightmare of school gym class becomes something wonderfully strange, funny and increasingly unhinged. The clay itself seems to take the beating along with its heroine – stretching, squashing and reshaping as she desperately tries to adapt, survive and somehow fit in. And knowing Hélène, she would have been gifting the cinema with her big, boisterous laugh throughout Ball Face.
Animated Short Competition – Category Prizes
Best Animated Short Award
Winner: Eri (dir. Honami Yano)
Jury Comment: For its living poetry of both images and words that depict a love that remains unmet, this film carries us through a lyrical pasture like wind through grass with thick painterly strokes.
Best Commissioned Animation
Winner: Juana Molina, Desinhumano (dir. Dante Zaballa)
Jury Comment: For its use of deceptively simple handmade forms, in a time of increasingly computer-aided animation, we found this film refreshingly joyful and tactile.
Bento Box Award for Best Student Animation
Winner: Ball Face (dir. Laurence Thérien)
Jury Comment: For its ability to take the embarrassment of youth and distill it into a mature, concise film that resonated beyond its initial comedic impression.
Canadian Student Award
Winner: Ball Face (dir. Laurence Thérien)
Comment: For capturing the absurdity and anxiety of masking, adjusting and trying to fit in, with clay animation proving the perfect medium for a story about literally reshaping yourself to belong. Its bright, candy-colored world gives the film a playful lightness, even as it moves between comedy and something quietly heartbreaking – that familiar memory of what we were willing to do during our school years just to fit in.
Honorable Mention: Mortal Lace (dir. Lucas Piperias)
Honorable Mention: Expo Inferno (dir. A. John Yates)
Animation for Teen Audiences 13+ Competition
Winner: Blue Flavored (dir. Jett Ulysses)
Honorable Mention: La comète (The Comet) (dir. Julie Charette)
Animation for Young Audiences 7+ Competition
Winner: Candy Caries (dir. Tomoki Misato)
Honorable Mention: Bats and Bugs (dir. Lena von Döhren)
Platform Animation Competition
Winner: Adult Swim’s The Elephant (dirs. Pendleton Ward, Rebecca Sugar, Ian Jones-Quartey, Patrick McHale, Mike L. Mayfield, Humberto Irigoyen, Remus Buznea and Kyriaki Kyriakou)
Comment: For the spirit of the anijam – or, more precisely, the old exquisite-corpse game – this three-part experiment brings together some of the defining voices in contemporary animation. Each team worked in isolation, with essentially no idea what the others were making, and somehow these wildly different pieces eventually had to become one film.
The result could easily have been a complete mess. Instead, it’s a bizarre, vivid and mysterious visual and narrative adventure – unpredictable from moment to moment, but never less than engaging. And frankly, it would be good to see more studios show this kind of boldness and openness to experimentation, creating work that breaks away from the increasingly tedious reliance on conventional linear storytelling.
Animated Short Competition – Craft Awards
Best Script
Winner: Uka-uka (dir. Henri Veermäe)
Jury Comment: For its complex arrangement of themes from the viewpoint of a child that is presented with a tender yet cruel frankness that took us off guard. This film’s sudden turn showed us resiliency in difficult situations.
The Animation Guild Craft Award for Best Design
Winner: When the Sea Was Calm (dir. Mamuka Tkeshelashvili)
Jury Comment: For its mixture of bliss and horror that was acutely felt through its impeccably realized construction, we were taken into its rich character and setting design from its first frame.
XPPen Craft Award Prize for Best Animation Technique
Winner: Daughters of the Late Colonel (dir. Elizabeth Hobbs)
Jury Comment: For its economic use of mark making to create a vast space open for the imagination to move freely in.
Best Sound Design
Winner: Paper Trail (dir. Don Hertzfeldt)
Jury Comment: For its claustrophobic symphony of tactile foley scratches, squeaks, scrapes and rubs, this film gave us pause to consider the inevitable inertia of shrinking into adulthood.
50 in 50 – Our Favourite Canadian Animated Shorts – Awards
OIAF Team Choice: The Big Snit (dir. Richard Condie)
Public Prize: Meneath: The Hidden Island of Ethics (dir. Terril Calder)
Source: Ottawa International Animation Festival
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
