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.