The 44th edition of Anima, the Brussels International Animation Film Festival, also known as Anima Brussels (28 February–9 March 2025), just wrapped with a presentation of its awards, including prizes in the National Short Film Competition to Violette Delvoye’s French-Belgian co-production ‘The Mud Under My Window’ for Best Belgian Short Film, while Nicolas Piret’s ‘Silent Panorama’ scooped the Grand Prix for Best Short Film of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles. The very diverse Belgian national competition featured four blocks: two blocks were dedicated to works by professional filmmakers, and one was dedicated to student films. A fourth out-of-competition block was composed of three episodes of TV series screened independently as short films. Of the two professional film blocks, themes drawing from Franco-Belgian histories, both good and bad, began to emerge. The shorts in the student film block were punctuated by several very crisp shorts of around four minutes in length.
Anne Verbeure’s The Golden Donkey won the Author Award in the national competition, which the jury highlighted as having a “falsely naïve visual charm that resonates with a contemporary reality”. Utilizing an uncanny, off-kilter sense of humor, the film follows three intersecting stories of a royal family in a medieval castle. The king believes himself to be made of glass, leading him to be afraid of everything around him and of life shattering before his eyes. He teaches a donkey, adorned with a golden crown, to write, leading us to learn that the donkey is actually the prince in the animal’s body. Meanwhile, the princess, with a tiny peach-fuzz mustache, hunts a unicorn and finds a key with which she cuts off her long, flowing hair—aspiring to make herself more masculine, purportedly to become king.
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With a characteristic, dry sense of Flemish-Dutch humor, Verbeure’s painted style makes one think of the often bizarrely shaped creatures of medieval books, where animals are flattened, proportions are slightly off, and something vaguely comedic hangs about in its peculiarity. For instance, in The Golden Donkey, the facial features of each character are frequently drawn very small compared to the size of their face, an innately humorous choice. By the work’s end, the filmmaker goes fully into a sense of self-aware absurdity with medieval residents twerking, spanking one another, puking, and screaming amidst engulfing flames.
‘The Golden Donkey’ by Anne Verbeure
Marie Royer and Zinia Scorier’s ‘Mealitancy’ (with yet another pun embedded in its original title, ‘Plat de résistance’) emerged quickly as an impressive demonstration of creative possibilities within the animated documentary form. As stated in the film, the work combines recorded audio from conversations and protests of the ZAD (“zone to defend”, a term referring to a militant occupation preventing a development project) established on a plot of urban land in Dijon, France, that the occupiers call Quartier Libre des Lentillères (“free district of Lentillères”). Its pastel-hued, colorful, and sketch-like animation style immediately draws viewers’ attention to the movement as vibrant and youthful, refusing to bend to the darker elements of the ZAD’s livelihood, such as destruction from the government.
Rather than a non-diegetic narration combined with visuals, Royer and Scorier instead animate sequences in accordance with what exists from the clips of audio. She patches together what can be seen as almost a series of vignettes that together show life in the ZAD, including cultivating homegrown produce, cooking community meals, fighting against the razing of the ZAD, and selling produce on a donation basis. The filmmakers further use the motif of ants to subtly allude to scale: the residents of the ZAD—which has existed for over 13 years—are passed over by the state like inconsequential insects, but together, their resilience as a group cannot be beat. The only main drawback to this approach is that it paints a picture rather than a firm story arc—which, for the 12-minute runtime, could have strengthened the film’s message of solidarity even more.
The Flemish-language short ’Ziggurat’ by Pieter Samyn stood out for harkening back to the legacy of Belgian comic strip illustration. As a playful crime-comedy caper, the short follows the titular inspector, a Jacques Clouseau-type fumbling character, who investigates a murder at an art fair but fails to grasp basic clues in the search. Beyond several blatantly sexual moments in ‘Ziggurat’, Samyn embeds references to countless famous works of art, both contemporary and of antiquity, adding to the tongue-in-cheek quality of the film. While its storyline could use some tidying up, as the inspector’s quest ultimately derails in a way that is more confusing than humorous, the work undoubtedly stands out due to its visual style. The filmmaker uses color blocking, strong shapes and geometries, scenes utilizing monochromaticism of blue and pink, touches of half-tone, and minimal shadows to create a bold, distinct style that stays imprinted in the viewer’s mind.
‘Ziggurat’ by Pieter Samyn
Two professional short films also grappled with the legacy of colonialism and its associated horrors in the context of both Belgium (‘Nkondi’ by Daniel Cattier, Frederick Palmaers, and Michael Palmaers) and France (‘Cimarron’ by Cédric Bourgeois and Rémi Vandenitte). While they admirably seek to tackle the extreme traumas of lived experience under Belgian rule in the Congo and the French in the territory of New France (set within present-day Canada), respectively, the films demonstrate a curious case of so-called decolonial-aligned stories that ultimately rely on external elements to legitimize the lives of the characters. More specifically, both bend to the allure of a mystical or exoticizing narrative, such as the case of the eponymous statuette that is said to house a spirit in the case of ‘Nkondi’, or the quiet presence of a war-painted Indigenous character who becomes a reminder of the protagonist’s ethical code of a man forced into slavery in ‘Cimarron’. It remains up to the viewer to determine whether this is an inspired creative choice or one that allows the filmmakers to get away with a more fantastical narrative that avoids full confrontation with historical wrongdoings.
Eerie, striking short films also impressed in the student shorts portion of the national competition, including ‘JUDY1964’ by Marie-Hélène van Thuyne and ‘Red Meat’ by Eleni Aerts. ‘JUDY1964’ is crafted as a puppet stop-motion film in a faux one-shot style over four minutes, where viewers discover a young girl drawing in a kitchen, an advertisement for a toy gun playing on the television, and, later, a quiet but shocking reveal in the film’s final few moments. Acute viewers will spot clues scattered throughout the scene, including a cup of milk spilled on the kitchen counter. Van Thuyne’s attention to detail in the production design amplifies the work’s narrative efficacy, as a full story is told in real-time and in one single space, heavily dependent upon what audiences pick up on as the camera traces slowly across the room.
Aerts’ ‘Red Meat’ collected the Award for Best Animation in the national competition, where the jury described the film as having a “raw, lively, and punchy style”. Drawn in red and black, the film is led by a narration of a poem by Anne Carson from her 1998 verse novel ‘Autobiography of Red’, which tells the Greek myth of Geryon, the grandson of Medusa. The animations accompany the voiceover in smudged, surrealist form like a fever dream, evoking a sense of body horror with so-called “crudely-drawn” landscapes and animals that transform strangely onscreen. The music by Frédérique Le Duc-Moreau rounds out the uncanny feeling of the film, which features string instruments played in three ways: plucked (pizzicato), col legno (played “with the wood” of the bow), and with the hair of the bow, creating the feeling of a horror movie score through the combination of sound and melody. The work is reminiscent of the style in another film that uses the so-called scrawl-like harshness of the drawn style to accentuate its corporeal nature: Mansi Maheshwari’s ‘Bunnyhood’, which screened in the International Student Films section of this year’s Anima.
Anima, the Brussels International Animation Film Festival (also known as Anima Brussels), ran from 28 February–9 March 2025 in Flagey, Brussels.
