Taichung International Animation Festival - Veterans vs Rising Stars
"Penguin Highway", adapted from best-selling novel and voiced by Japanese stars Yu Aoi and Hikaru Utada, holds its Taiwan premiere in Taichung
"Mutafukaz", a collaboration between a French animation studio and the animation director of "Kamikaze Girls" and "Tekkonkinkreet"
The 2018 TIAF announces the fourth batch of films selected for the program, introducing veteran animators as well as rising stars to the audience in Taiwan. They include director Hiroyasu Ishida's debut feature, Penguin Highway, voiced by a star-studded cast and Mutafukaz, adapted from the best-selling comic book with the same title and a collaboration between veteran director Shojiro Nishimi and the French animation company Studio 4℃. In addition, the TIAF presents two new strands, "Talents in Focus: New Female Wave" and "Special Program: Desire, Sexuality & Animation", showing classics together with new directors' works.
Since he was 21, Hiroyasu Ishida has won several awards at the Japan Media Arts Festival for his short films, including Fumiko's Confession and Rain Town. This year, as he turned thirty, Ishida made his feature debut, Penguin Highway, which won Best Animated Feature, the Satoshi Kon Awards at the 2018 Fantasia International Film Festival (Canada). Adapted from the best-selling novel by Tomihiko Morimi and voiced by a cast of popular Japanese stars such as Yu Aoi, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Naoto Takenaka and famous voice actors, including Mamiko Noto and Rie Kugimiya, Penguin Highway tells a story of a group of penguins suddenly appearing in a small town in Japan. In order to solve this mystery, the protagonist begins a crazy research project entitled, "Penguin Highway". Attracted to the fantastic and colorful visual style and the enchanting story, Japanese popular singer Hikaru Utada joins the production and records the theme song.
Shojiro Nishimi, who took part in the production of Akira and Lupin the Third and served as animation director on Kamikaze Girls and Tekkonkinkreet, has collaborated with Studio 4℃ on Mutafukaz, an adaptation of the popular comic book. Presented in a combination of ruins and sci-fi setting in the future, it depicts how the life of Anglino, a deadbeat living in Dark Meat City, is changed after a car accident and a series of crazy adventures that follow the incident.
This year the TIAF comes up two new categories – "Talents in Focus: New Female Wave" and "Special Program: Desire, Sexuality & Animation" to show the works of three rising female directors and the classic animated films on sexual desire. In Talents in Focus: New Female Wave, there are the Time Trilogy by Korean director Dehee Jeong, the Family Trilogy by Eva Cvijanović, a Bosnian filmmaker currently based in Canada and the Love Quartet by Slovenian animator Špela Čadež. The ten short films in this strand demonstrate the unique individual styles of these three directors.
Special program: Desire, Sexuality & Animation is curated by Jayne Pilling, our guest programmer. It is a collection of classic animated films on sexual desire made between the 1970s and 2000s, which show how visually daring and avant-garde animation could be. Jayne Pilling expresses that she hopes that this collection of films could provide the audience with a different angle to see how sex and desire are expressed in animation. It includes Asparagus (1979), which is praised as the landmark of the independent animation and still shocks and provokes the audiences today and Ring of Fire, which tells the story of two cowboys and is revered as a masterpiece in the history of animation. Its profound influence can still be detected in the recent television drama, Westworld. The audience could see all these eight classic animated films on sexual desire in one go at the 2018 TIAF.
The 2018 TIAF is held between October 11th (Thursday) and 16th (Tuesday) at Taichung Showtime Cinemas S2 and Kbro Cinemas. The tickets will go on sale at 12:00 pm on September 21st (Friday) on ibon machines nationwide and seats can be reserved online. An program guide to the 2018 TIAF program is to be held on September 22nd (Saturday) at the Taichung Liuchuan Canal Waterfront, and Taiwanese animated film Happiness Road will be screened. For more information on the program and events, please visit the TIAF official website (twtiaf.com) and Facebook fan page (facebook.com/tiaf.taichung).
