Tag: animation

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2025 Dream Animation Film Festival 3

The winner of this year’s “Audience Choice” award went to Daniel Rabanea for “Bends.”

Daniel described the dream that inspired his film as follows:

“I was alone on the beach. At first everything seemed calm until the sea started to look strange. A wave formed and grew bigger and bigger. My fear grew along with the dark and chaotic wave, and I thought there was no escape. But when the big wave finally hit me, something unexpected happened, the wave didn’t hit me, on the contrary, it gently caressed my face. And everything slowly calmed down. There I remained, alone on the beach, perplexed, amazed, transformed.”

And this is the process Daniel used to transform his dream into an animated film:

“I had this dream around 2010 and wrote it down in my ideas pad. Fifteen years later, the Instagram algorithm introduced me to the Dream Animation Festival. After reading the submission rules I quickly remembered my old dream and decided to make this animation. Turning the dream into animation was an adventure full of discoveries. I believed it would be a more obvious adaptation, but I discovery that dream and animation have their own particularities, the dream strongly marked by subjective sensations and the animation by objective images and sounds. During the immersive production process I was able to reflect even more on the meanings of my dream. The external, the sea that bends into waves, the chaotic nature of the universe, in connection with the internal, subjectivity, the mind building itself in bends, the dreamy nature of consciousness. The succession of events, the transformation, the devir, “you cannot step into the same river twice”.

For anyone who has experienced a dream of being menaced by an enormous tidal wave, “Bends” offers a surprising alternative to the way these dreams usually end. Daniel’s use of simple graphite drawings provides lots of space for the viewer’s imagination to fill in the subjective experience of confronting a tidal wave. For such a short film (90 seconds) it builds to a strong emotional peak and then resolves in a moment of magical transformation. No wonder the audience loved it!

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2025 Dream Animation Film Festival 2

The prize for this year’s Best Animation Style went to Daniele Grosso for “The Bird Insect Tornado.”

Here is Daniele’s description of the dream that inspired the film:

“I am at a picnic on the bank of a river with some friends. I notice a flock of pinkish colored bird insects flying around a tree. I start to film them, and the flock makes a beautiful movement in the air. Their movement suddenly becomes a tornado. We pick up our things and run towards some ruins where I think we can take refuge.”

The film uses sophisticated computer-generated imagery to bring us into a three-dimensional world populated by tiny bubbles endlessly morphing in and out of various shapes and forms. Linda Koncz, the festival administrator, said this of Daniele’s work:

“The entire visuality is built on bubbles, which makes me feel as though I’m underwater, in the subconscious, and the sounds of children laughing and wind add to the dreamlike atmosphere. Each frame built of bubbles is being blown away by the wind to create the next frame, just as in dreams, the connectedness of the parts is not linear, the story fragments connect in a free associative way, like a light wave of wind…(and then gets forgotten like a mandala blown away:)”

This year’s festival asked participants to consider dreams in relation to nature and the environment, and Daniele’s film achieves this by portraying the ever-changing dynamics of human interactions with other animate creatures and with the inanimate forces of nature. The bird-insects represent one kind of unusual merging and metamorphosis; the change of the bird-insects into a tornado represents an even more dramatic transformation. The trajectory of the dream suggests we humans may find these changes increasingly unfavorable to our peace and tranquility.

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2025 Dream Animation Film Festival 1

The prize for this year’s “Best Animation Narrative” went to Jessie Rodriguez for “Dreams – A Memory of Ghosts.”

 

This is how Jessie describes her work, which all the judges of the festival agreed is an outstanding piece of dream creativity:

“My new animation, ‘Dreams: a Memory of Ghosts,’ explores how I seem to remember my dreams in fragments, little pieces that are still with me when I wake up. Seeing the theme of climate change, I focused on bringing to life the dreams I had around animals and the earth. I have chosen an animation style of an early silent film, with intertitles as a throw back to early cinema. In this animation I have it split into three Acts, each one came from a dream. The dreams I animated all came to life from February-March of this year when I was recording them.

  • Act 1-the Council: I look through the bushes and see a procession of animals who don’t know I am there, who seem to be having a secret meeting. They turn and look at me.
  • Act 2-Cat Boxes: A house has towers of covered plastic bins going up a hundred feet in the air. They start to fall down and cats emerge from all of them. I catch some bins unsure if I should let the cats out or keep the lid on.
  • Act 3-Premium Death Package: There is an old woman sitting by her future grave. She has purchased the premium death package that allows for up to $300,000 worth of classes each year she can take once she is dead. She eagerly awaits her descent into the grave.

To share with you a little about my process, I make all of my work and films completely by hand. I work out of Denver, Colorado in the United States. My stop motion animations are created from linocut printmaking. The techniques used to make these films involve creating every visual element from scratch. Characters, textures, background and text are made by hand carving each piece out of linoleum, hand printing onto paper and then cutting out, arranging and shooting frame by frame. I employ multi-plane and other experimental techniques for each animation. I love being able to bring my ideas to life through small-scale filmmaking, and am inspired by other filmmakers who used this process such as Lotte Reininger who worked entirely with shadows and cut paper.”

Speaking for myself (and not necessarily all the other festival judges), I was completely enchanted by the oneiric atmosphere Jessie creates in her work. The retro aesthetic—hand-crafted stop-motion in an old silent film format—generated for me a very dreamy and pleasantly uncanny feeling of open imagination and an awareness that the dynamism of the past is still a living presence today. The three-dream structure invites interpretive reflections on the symbolic and emotional interplay between the separate acts of the film. Each of the three dreams touches on the festival’s theme of nature and the environment, and each one expresses some special insight about the natural world, some little koan of ecological wisdom. Thank you, Jessie!

And thanks to Linda Koncz for administering the festival and the Elsewhere.to team–Gez Quinn, Kat Juncker, Dan Kennedy, and Victoria Philibert–for their support at all stages of the process.