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Children on Planet A: Woods, Water, Tornados

8+

As part of this year’s accompanying programme titled Planet A, we have prepared screenings of short environmental films for children of all ages. In this showcase for children above 8 years of age, you will see many different films which are definitely not boring educational or unpleasant agitational animations. On the contrary, this showcase includes film stories or puns offering various perspectives on the issue of environmental protection.

You will see a moving drama involving migrating bears but also a delightful story of a garden that decided to move. You will find out how serious deforestation is in the acclaimed Brazilian film Plantae. A humorous fictitious report on the life of hot air molecules will explain to young audiences how a tornado is formed. What about roasting some plastic fished from the sea for lunch? The ironic tone of some of the films, including a new student film titled Shoot, is balanced by the poetic and deeply moving Canadian film Man Who Planted Trees.

And in the very first film of the showcase, The Planet Comes First, we will find out that everyone can help the planet by planting a tree.

 The Planet Comes First: April

Director: Jakub Hussar, Czech Republic, 2020, 3 min

Migrants

Directors: Hugo Caby, Antoine Dupriez, Aubin Kubiak, Lucas Lermytte, Zoé Devise, France, 2020, 8 min

The Lost Garden / Le jardin perdu 

Director: Natalia Chernysheva, France, 2018, 3 min

Baked Fish

Director: Guillem Miró, Spain, 2018, 4 min

Plantae

Director:  Guilherme Gehr, Brazil, 2017, 10 min

Shoot

Director: Ema Mlynarčíková, Czech Republic, 2020, 3 min

The Story of a Tornado / Ako vzniká tornádo 

Director: Veronika Kocourková, Slovakia, 2013, 6 min

Man Who Planted Trees

Director: Frédéric Back, Canada, 1987, 30 min

Although (or perhaps because) planet Earth is plagued by many problems caused by us humans, it remains an inexhaustible source of inspiration, enthusiasm and awe not only for scientists of various specialisations, but for other people all around the world. And it’s this awe, or love if you will, that connects the films of this block. The films celebrate and search for the secret of life in the universe (Living on the Comet) or go deep below the icy surface of Antarctica in order to reveal the mysteries of our planet’s past (The Secrets Held in the Ice). Other films from this block, on the other hand, focus on the planet’s surface. Thanks to Norwegian director Morten Skallerud and his film made using the technique of hyperlapse, we will spend A Year Along the Abandoned Road and then move to Australia in a short film personifying the sacred Uluru. Reach, using sounds heard in nature, is a pure audio-visual impression. The Natural Order of Things is a commentary on the laws of nature with humorously subversive references to people. The internationally acclaimed films Cow and The Man Who Planted Trees by animation legends Aleksandr Petrov and Frédéric Back are superbly animated and artistically charming testimonies about nature and the place of humankind in it.

Living on the Comet

Director: Kathy Smith, Australia, 1993, 13 min

The Secrets Held in the Ice

Director: Loïc Fontimpe, France, 2015, 14 min

Reach

Directors: Kayla Parker, Stuart Moore, United Kingdom, 2014, 3 min

Cow

Director: Aleksandr Petrov, Soviet Union, 1989, 10 min

Ayers Rock Animation

Director: Kathy Smith, Australia, 1985, 2 min

A Year Along the Abandoned Road

Director: Morten Skallerud, Norway, 1991, 12 min

The Natural Order of Things

Director: Mathilde Poigniez, France, 2019, 4 min

The Man Who Planted Trees

Director: Frédéric Back, Canada, 1987, 30 min

In the field of animated family features, Pixar is a household name. Mainstream, yet top-quality films made by the studio boast elaborate scripts, top dramaturgy and modern technologies. Meticulous CGI with excellent textures and superb animation has always been synonymous with Pixar. The studio, which always uses state-of-the-art technologies, sometimes manages to go beyond ‘quality entertainment’ and include a message in its films. That is the case of its Academy Award-winning sci-fi film Wall-E screened at this year’s Anifilm in the Planet A programme. Its disturbing story is set in the year 2700. Planet Earth has become a trash-strewn wasteland and all life has been de facto suffocated. Humanity relocated to a spaceship a long time ago and left the planet to robots for cleaning. Of these robots, only one remains operational – Wall-E. To brighten up his daily routine of endless cleaning, he collects various curiosities and memorabilia. His only friend and companion is a cockroach. But one day Wall-E, who after hundreds of years of solitude starts feeling human emotions, discovers a tiny plant. Does that mean that photosynthesis has been restored on Earth? At this very moment, a probe named EVE arrives on Earth with the objective to find out whether the planet is habitable again. 

8+

As part of this year’s accompanying programme titled Planet A, we have prepared screenings of short environmental films for children of all ages. In this showcase for children above 8 years of age, you will see many different films which are definitely not boring educational or unpleasant agitational animations. On the contrary, this showcase includes film stories or puns offering various perspectives on the issue of environmental protection.

You will see a moving drama involving migrating bears but also a delightful story of a garden that decided to move. You will find out how serious deforestation is in the acclaimed Brazilian film Plantae. A humorous fictitious report on the life of hot air molecules will explain to young audiences how a tornado is formed. What about roasting some plastic fished from the sea for lunch? The ironic tone of some of the films, including a new student film titled Shoot, is balanced by the poetic and deeply moving Canadian film Man Who Planted Trees.

And in the very first film of the showcase, The Planet Comes First, we will find out that everyone can help the planet by planting a tree. 

The Planet Comes First: April
Director: Jakub Hussar, Czech Republic, 2020, 3 min

Migrants
Directors: Hugo Caby, Antoine Dupriez, Aubin Kubiak, Lucas Lermytte, Zoé Devise, France, 2020, 8 min

The Lost Garden / Le jardin perdu
Director: Natalia Chernysheva, France, 2018, 3 min

Baked Fish
Director: Guillem Miró, Spain, 2018, 4 min

Plantae
Director:  Guilherme Gehr, Brazil, 2017, 10 min

Shoot
Director: Ema Mlynarčíková, Czech Republic, 2020, 3 min

The Story of a Tornado / Ako vzniká tornádo
Director: Veronika Kocourková, Slovakia, 2013, 6 min

Man Who Planted Trees
Director: Frédéric Back, Canada, 1987, 30 min

4+

This showcase is intended for children above 4 years of age. The films screened share a focus on the environment and humanity’s behaviour in it. Princess Prga will introduce the insidious Plastor Nezmar and show us how to deal with him. Also the popular family of Little Rain Worms has to deal with litter as an inconsiderate tourist visits their forest. But the forest animals know what to do and they send a clear message to children: litter doesn’t belong in nature!

Zdeněk Miler’s timeless Little Mole has a different problem: a highway is to be built over his garden. Can a small animal prevail over a huge bulldozer destroying everything in its way? The Little Mole doesn’t give up. Another fairy tale takes us to Africa – in Snowflake, a little boy finds out what his country would look like if it started snowing. The last film in this showcase is the charming fairy tale Lost and Found about loneliness, the power of friendship and mainly about a little boy who decides to return a penguin to its home – even if it means an arduous journey to the South Pole.

The Planet Comes First: February
Director: Jakub Hussar, Czech Republic, 2020, 3 min

Snowflake / Snejinka
Director: Natalya Chernysheva, Russia, 2012, 7 min

Little Rain Worms: Tourist
Director: Jaromír Gál, Czech Republic, 2012, 7 min

The Little Mole and the Bulldozer
Director: Zdeněk Miler, Czechoslovakia, 1975, 6 min

Lost and Found
Director: Philip Hunt, United Kingdom, 2008, 24 min

The year is 1992 and twelve-year-old Sever Cullis-Suzuki is speaking about the future of her peers and other people at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. As most of the films included in this programme block prove, a cruelly uncertain future is still affecting the lives (and not only the lives) of children 30 years later. The bears from Poles Apart (starring Helena Bonham Carter) also know that something’s going on as a future without a sufficiently large habitat has a fateful encounter in store for them. The animals from the competition film Mex and the Animals, on the other hand, have only a virtual chance. The colourfully charming film Spell of the West warns against greed and the young hero of Wild Boar learns about the importance of the environment we live in. Bill Plympton’s musical film No Snow for Christmas and Václav Bedřich’s Beer Across the Street are bitterly humorous commentaries on contemporary issues. Branching Out for a Green Economy, narrated by the legendary British natural historian David Attenborough strives to find a solution as does the testimony of another nature conservationist in Bright Spots. ‘If you don’t know how to fix it, stop breaking it,’ Severn appealed to world politicians almost thirty years before the movement Fridays for Future was established. Her emotional speech, accompanied by a joint effort of more than twenty directors is the closing film of this block.

A pressing demand has been imposed on contemporary artists to construct new language and images capable of grasping fast-pacing climate catastrophe in its whole natural, human, social and historical spectrum. A greater artistic challenge would be hard to imagine. When it comes to us, the film festival community, there is something we should do while we’re waiting and dreaming of a new symbolic order that would show us how to overcome the crisis, shake and awaken our dormant capacity for collective solidarity, interspecies empathy and individual self-agency in saving what’s most valuable in our surroundings. It’s an exercise in perceiving, decoding and interpreting films as cultural texts testifying to the currently prevailing fears, aspirations and desires. The presented programme might be discussed solely in terms of technique, cultural criticism and filmmaking qualities. But if we change the optics, we may discover that the metaphors within the films – embedded in puppet movements, colour compositions or the corporeality of animated objects – expand well-known/worn-out categories of discussion, their meanings drift towards the semantics of a new language and the cinema screen appears new. In order to become accustomed to the idea that business as usual is inevitably over it’s helpful to practice this exercise on each occasion. Enjoy the screening.

Curated by Olga Bobrowska

Machini Directors: Tétshim & Frank Mukunday, Belgium, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2019, 10 min

Winter in the Rainforest / Talv vihmametsas 
Director: Anu-Laura Tuttelberg, Estonia, Lithuania, Mexico, 2019, 9 min

Ostrich / Avestruz 
Director: Agostina Ravazzola, Argentina, 2019, 5 min

The Elephant / Słoń
Director: Dominika Wilkosz, Poland, 2019, 7 min

Sororelle
Directors: Louise Mercadier, Frédéric Even, France 2020, 15 min

Pandora
Director: Matthias Lerch, Germany, 2020, 7 min

Nadirah: Coal Woman
Directors: Negar Elodie Behzadi, Kate Jessop, United Kingdom, 2019, 3 min

Silent Embassies / Botschaften
Director: Daniel Höpfner, Germany, 2020, 15 min

The Story of Planet A began hundreds of millions of years ago in accordance with the life conditions created by the planet and the surrounding space. But it wasn’t until the last few decades that we have noticed that ‘something went wrong’.

The films in this block have different genres, animation techniques and artistic styles, but they all explore the themes of evolution and the unwanted direction the development of life took on our planet. The effect of humans on the development of other species, their irretrievable extinction, forced domestication, industrial exploitation, modification, unnecessary cruelty and excessive breeding have attracted the attention of many filmmakers. Some of them made ironically critical films (What Did We Do to the Hens), other chose experiments (The Tasmanian Tiger) or non-narrative films (Water Dream) and some even made absurd farcical films (Pandas). Using the technique of hyperlapse (replacing), the director of While Darwin Sleeps plays with the diversity of nature represented by dead animals pinned in museum showcases. The award-winning musical film Elephant’s Song with refined animation is also very suggestive. A curiosity in this block is the cut-out film Crabs, oscillating between sci-fi and horror and the disturbing nature of the whole programme is underlined by the films Nigel and Swarming. The first tells the story of a confused seabird trying to nest with a mate made of concrete and the second will show you how severe nature – in a seemingly inconspicuous event – can be in response to human cruelty.

Water Dream

Director: Koji Yamamura, Japan, 2017, 11 min

Nigel

Director: Natasza Cetner, United Kingdom, 2020, 9 min

Crabs

Director: Václav Mergl, Czechoslovakia, 1976, 11 min

Swarming

Director: Joni Männistö, Finland, 2011, 8 min

What Did We Do to the Hens

Director: Josef Hekrdla, Vladimír Jiránek, Czechoslovakia, 1977, 6 min

The Tasmanian Tiger

Director: Vergine Keaton, France, 2018, 14 min

The Elephant’s Song

Režie / Director: Lynn Tomlinson, United States, 2018, 8 min

While Darwin Sleeps

Director: Paul Bush, United Kingdom, 2004, 5 min 

Pandas

Director: Matúš Vizár, Czech Republic, Slovakia, 2012, 12 min

The unforgettable Dutch film Wildebeest, starring guileless tourist Linda, opens a block of films in which humans form a part of the environment they live in, an inseparable component of an immense natural cycle. Along with her outdoorsy husband, Linda goes on a safari to blend in with a herd of her favourite animals (shown in the film using real footage). In the Polish film Humming Forest, the lost hero experiences the inhospitable and dangerous side of wilderness, while the classic British film The Hill Farm takes us to an idyllic farm surrounded by nature where everything has its own rhythm and order – just like the meditative film Cycle 1 and the hypnotically flowing family abstraction Microphobia by Nikki Schuster, an acclaimed Austrian director with a penchant for environmental topics. Our quest to return to the trees ends with the epic film Legend of the Forest by the renowned Japanese manga artist and versatile genius Osamu Tezuka. His film from 1987 is characterised by the usage of many artistic styles trying to reflect the development of animation as a medium, its classical score using one of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, and in particular by its philosophic framework exploring the timeless topics of coexistence, harmony and respect.

When young Ashitaka, last prince of the ancient Emishi family, decides to save a small village from an enraged forest demon, he has no idea that this act of heroism will change his life for good. The touch of the huge boar-like demon, driven by hatred towards people, causes a much deeper wound than it would seem. In order to stop the hatred corrupting his body and eventually killing him and others, the prince has to go to a distant land and seek out the mysterious Great Forest Spirit, the only being capable of healing his wound. Ashitaka travels to Irontown, led by the strict Lady Eboshi. The town grows at the expense of the forests surrounding it: as the town expands, the habitat of the forest spirits shrinks. An iron ball which has transformed the boar-spirit into a raging monster comes from one of the town’s workshops. Ashitaka finds himself torn between two seemingly irreconcilable worlds – the realm of old forest spirits, whose life and death is watched over by the now and then oddly indifferent Great Forest Spirit, and the town in which Lady Eboshi gives jobs to lepers and protects local women. Thanks to a mysterious girl named San, Princess Mononoke, who repeatedly attacks the town with her wolf family, Ashitaka will find out if it’s even possible to choose a side. This iconic filmy by the legendary Hayao Miyazaki boasts magnificent and meticulous hand-drawn cel animation and apart from an environmental message, the film is characterised by one of the basic principles of Miyazaki’s films – the ambiguity of good and evil.

One of the most visible and tangible problems the inhabitants of Planet A must face is trash. It’s repulsive, provably harmful and intrusively ubiquitous. Efforts to eliminate it fail. Pollution of water, air, soil… take your pick, there’s plenty in store for everyone. No wonder that animators explore this theme thoroughly and persistently. The oldest ‘trash’ film in this programme was made in 1972 but there are even older films. Just like there are many ways to deal with garbage. The title of this programme was taken from the film Orgiastic Hyper-Plastic reflecting the inevitability and ambivalence of living with ‘our’ trash. But there are more straightforward (Big Bang, The Flat and Air!) and symbolic ways (Castillo and the Catfish) to portray it. It’s rewarding for the authors to let their imagination run wild, make the trash alive and put it and its residua into fictitious but realistically looking settings (Age of Rust, Hybrids, Oil Gobblers). The hidden beauty and secrets of thrown-away stuff can be discovered in the non-narrative film Absent, whose title expresses the wishful thinking of the inhabitants of Planet A about trash.

Humans began affecting life on Earth thousands of years ago. Our ancestors changed ancient landscapes and animal populations with slash-and-burn tactics and hunting. But it’s not that long ago that experts started seeing humans as the principal cause of changes on the face of the Earth. At the turn of the millennium, geochemist Paul J. Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer proposed that the geological epoch significantly affected by human impact on Earth be called Anthropocene. In our block of the same name, we will explore how this ‘age of man’ is reflected in nature and in ourselves. Two immortal geese will take us on a captivating excursion into the development of Western civilisation in God Has Already Gone Ahead. In their 1981 film The Status Report on Civilisation, Josef Hekrdla and Vladimír Jiránek commented humorously on our perception of nature and the circumstances of our own lives. So did Jiří Barta in his film Project, depicting reality tainted by a socialist climate. The mockumentary Lucens offers a humorous take on nuclear energy and Dam explores the effects of landscape engineering on local inhabitants. The Grind, depicting the ancient whaling tradition in the Faroe Islands, explores the relationship of humans to nature as a source of food and also the deep ties to one’s home. How fares humankind in the Anthropocene? This self-reflective question is asked in the satiric film PolarBarry and the closing metaphorical film Ark.

Once upon a time, there was a nursery of raccoons who loved their peace and quiet even though there were some scuffles now and then. But they were essentially peaceful creatures who, according to Japanese folklore, possessed magical powers (just like foxes). But once their home found itself in danger from the pervasive diggers and bulldozers of construction companies, they realised that something had to be done and decided to finally fully utilise their almost forgotten powers.

The simple plot of this layered film by Isao Takahata of the renowned Studio Ghibli, known for his war drama Grave of the Fireflies, is seemingly a spectacle for children. But thanks to its imaginativeness, inventiveness and in particular, a wide range of complex themes, the film will appeal to grown-up audiences. Not only the methods used by the raccoons to discourage humans from destroying their homes, but also the reactions of their adversaries and the increasing disunity of the raccoon society regarding their next move are remarkable. In his superbly animated film, Takahata doesn’t explore merely the frictions between what we perceive as nature and civilisation, but also asks deeper questions regarding human (or raccoon) souls and the possibilities of change for an individual or an entire society. These are questions which have the utmost importance in our time, burdened by an environmental crisis.

This medium-length film is a curiosity in our programme focusing on animated films with environmental themes. Its message is: ‘how much longer can humans foul their own nest and ignore the consequences?’ Its delivery is rather straightforward as the film is a sort of lecture by Dr. Fred H. Knelman, Professor of Science and Human Affairs at Montreal’s Concordia University, whose words are interspersed with animated sequences. Knelman’s lecture might seem humorous and some of his remarks are naturally conditioned by the geopolitical situation of the time the lecture was given but – and we have to say unfortunately – some of them are still valid. We are, of course, interested in the animated parts. They were created thanks to the unique partnership of two prominent animation studios – the National Film Board of Canada and the former Yugoslavian Zagreb Film. The resulting superbly animated sequences significantly help to transmit the film’s warning with unflagging humour, imagination, movement and design. In addition to renowned Croatian animators Dušan Vukotić and Nedeljko Dragić, you can see the surprising name of American filmmaker Chuck Jones in the closing credits.