The Ottawa International Animation Festival isn't just a film festival, it's a 'dysfunctional family reunion'

If you were to ask the average person to guess the home of North America's largest and oldest animation festival, they would probably name a couple dozen cities before they landed on Ottawa. It's a city you associate with federal bureaucracy, chaotic Canada Day celebrations, and good shawarma, not film festivals.

But since 1976, the Ottawa International Animation Festival — which starts Sept. 21 and runs until the 25 — has given animators who aren't making what artistic director Chris Robinson calls "Hanna-Barbera, Disney, Warner Brothers-type stuff" an opportunity to show their work — and, more importantly, a sense of community.

"It's a pretty fun festival," he says. "We take it seriously, but not too seriously. There's a lot of parties, social events. You know, we have this animators' picnic every Friday. There's a pumpkin carving contest. It's really about community."

"The films and the competition are important and the industry stuff that goes on. But really it's just about bringing this relatively small community internationally together like a family dysfunctional family reunion."

Now, for the first time in two years, that reunion is entirely in-person.

Robinson, who personally screens all 2,500 of the submissions the festival gets every year, talked to us about why animation deserves its own festivals, and how such an important one wound up in our nation's capital.

CBC Arts: Why does animation need its own, separate circuit of festivals?

Chris Robinson: When it's at live action [film] festivals, [animators] are basically just a sidebar, an afterthought. Maybe that's a bit harsh, but they're not central. Animation festivals are essential because we are putting the spotlight on animators.

Ours is unique because we mix industry and indie and student [films]. In our competition, you can see a Coke commercial next to an Austrian abstract film next to a narrative NFB film. We put everything together, kind of try to bridge those worlds, but we put our focus on highlighting indie, or alternative, for lack of a better word, animation.

Despite all of the things that have changed over the years — the rise of streaming services and Vimeo and YouTube and whatnot — unless you know what you're looking for, the only place you're going to find a lot of this work is still at animation festivals. Maybe [animation] is like the poetry of cinema or something. It's a little bit more of a niche audience, I guess.

Ottawa has this reputation as kind of an uptight government town. How did it wind up with North America's largest animation festival?

I'm Ottawa born and bred, so I know all about the old government town thing, and I also used to wonder early on, "How did they get a festival here?" Animation festivals tend to be in the smaller cities, whether it's Annecy in France or Hiroshima, Japan, or Utrecht in the Netherlands. When [the first organizers] were wanting to do something in Canada, you know, I guess [they] decided Ottawa was it?

Ottawa was between Montreal and Toronto, and there is a history of animation in Ottawa as well. The National Film Board of Canada was housed in Ottawa from 1930 until 1955 when they moved on to Montreal. Even in the '60s and '70s, there wasn't much of an animation industry anywhere [in Canada], but there was a pretty strong community in Ottawa. So, you know, I think that's that's partially why it landed here. Why it stayed? I don't know. I have to ask the audience that.

How did you wind up running this festival?

I started in like '91 or '92. I was a film studies student at Carleton and a classmate says, "Hey, they're looking for somebody to do box office for the Canadian Film Institute," which is the organizer of the festival, and that started me on a long road towards animation.

So you've been involved with this festival at different levels for, like, 30…

Years? Yeah. 1992 was my first festival. My job used to be to process the submissions. Back in those days, people would mail them in. You'd get film prints, 35 and 16 millimetre film prints that you had to coordinate, as opposed to today where it's links to Vimeo and whatnot.

It's crazy how much it's changed. Back then, in '92, it was maybe 700 and 750 submissions, and that was over a two-year period because animation festivals were biennial until the mid-'90s. Today we get 2,500 films a year.

This is your first time fully in-person since 2019. What do you think will be different compared to then?

Masks, probably. I'm sure that people [will be] wearing masks still. So that'll still be different, and a reminder that we're not out of this yet.

What will be different onscreen?

I think it was more noticeable the last two years, where we did see a rise in films about the pandemic experience. That seems to have settled down.

We jokingly sit and make notes about common themes we see every year, you know, which could be like, fish, lots of fish, lots of penises, lots of vaginas and plants. But to me, [there's] nothing that noticeable that's changed.

We've always shown so many diverse works that have so many diverse techniques and whatnot. So it'll still be more of that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.