Bradford Animation Festival 2013 – Winners, Highlights & Photos

22 November 2013 // Reviews

Another year, another fantastic Bradford Animation Festival – but this wasn’t just any year – this was BAF’s 20th anniversary year, and what a line up they had to celebrate!

To start with, we had the fantastic festival sting by Joanna Quinn, which featured Beryl in her first animated adventure for 7 years. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it here.

BAF had a slight slant on stop-motion this year, with the opening night film being Nightmare Before Christmas which was also celebrating its’ 20th anniversary, plus the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award going to Mackinnon & Saunders

If this wasn’t enough there was the brilliantly funny ‘In Conversation’ with Adam Elliot, hosting by Barry Purves, which we think set the record for longest talk, at almost 3 hours! However, everyone was in agreement that they could have watched Adam and Barry talk for another 3 hours.

Michaela Pavlátová‘s masterclass was a real treat, looking at her body of work right up to the present day ‘Tram‘, which won the 2012 Annecy Cristal. As a Czech director, Pavlátová’s films tackle the challenge of the language barrier, and left the BAF audience enthralled and in laughter – especially her film ‘Words, Words, Word’.

One of the highlights for animators and non-animators alike was the Adam Buxton ‘The Best of BUG‘ event, which took a look at some of Adam’s favourite animated music videos, including Cyriak, who was a special guest and came on stage to discuss his techniques and methods.

Skwigly had quite a presence at this year’s festival, with both the Skwigly Animation Quiz (which will be coming soon online), and the Skwigly Animattion Showcase, which showed a selection of the films uploaded to our online showcase. (Click here if you have a film to upload!)

If you haven’t listened already, we released 4 daily podcast minisodes during the festival:

A huge thanks must go to the team that put BAF together – it truely is one of the best animation festivals around and we eagerly countdown to next year.

(Photographs courtesy of Jonny Walton Photography)