3 Belgian Shorts That Made Anima History In The Past Years
Two days before the Brussels Intl. Animation Festival Announces its 2025 Awards, let's take a look back a few winning shorts from the last editions.
Anima is in full swing.
As always, the festival brings together the Belgian animation industry, with many events, workshops, speed-dating sessions and talents presenting what they have to offer to national and international audiences.
And let’s not forget the iconic Belgian cocktail, where producers, directors, studio heads and students alike share thoughts, insights, and — of course — Belgian beers.
In the middle of this buzzing event, it’s hard to pinpoint a single event or a single film that deserves attention, because they all deserve it.
So, as I put back my Animation Belgian shoes with — thanks to the lovely and talented director Britt Raes — a brand new visual identity, let’s take a few steps back in time to re-discover Belgian shorts saluted by Anima’s past juries.
Drijf
Author’s price for a Belgian Short at Anima 2024, Drijf is Levi Stoops’ first professional film. According to Lunanime’s short bio — the studio with which he created Drijf — , Stoops graduated the Brussels’ RITCS (Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema & Sound) as an animation director with the short D:729 — available here — and started working as a cook to provide for himself while writing his first animation short.
On a calm sea, two human beings in their simplest attire drift on a makeshift boat. Will Aurora and Jeremy survive this ordeal, and what will happen to their relationship if they do?
Playing with the bodies of his protagonists as much as the expectations of the spectators, Stoops delivers a short film that is sometimes tender, sometimes bloody, about the turmoil of love and existence.
Because sometimes, an amputation is enough to bring a couple back together.
And that's not the only irony that the filmmaker, who went on to win the Jury Prize at Annecy 2023, offers the hungry viewer. Aurora and Jeremy may be lost in the middle of a gigantic ocean with no apparent escape, but they are nonetheless human beings full of flaws, tics and quirks. Naked as worms, both of them don't hesitate to take their minds off things with a little session of solitary pleasure, fueled by more or less aquatic fantasies. You take your minds off things as best you can, when you're stuck on a piece of wood in the middle of nowhere.
With his two characters, Levi Stoops has fun and plays with scales, alternately giving us magnificent purulent close-ups and infinite landscapes.
Animated with precision and humor, Drijf is a gem that, beneath its gloomy and uneasy appearance, gives a glimpse of the human condition in all its complexity. An existence woven from survival instincts, violence, individualism, but also love and self-sacrifice.
Optimistic? More than it seems, without however departing from a biting cynicism that is often a trademark of Flemish independent directors.
Drijf is available to watch on Shadowz in Belgium, and through Shadowz’s Prime Video channel.
Monachopsis
I was really glad that Monachopsis received the Cinergie Award back in Anima 2021. It’s not often that I find the time to do jury work, and being able to support this beautiful film was a delight to me.
A few months after this edition, I also had the chance to chat with Liesbet about her film in the La Fabrique Fantastique studios. I will publish this interview — made for Cinergie in French — in a future newsletter, but here’s an excerpt of it to put more context on this wonder of a short.
For Monachopsis, as for the rest of my films, it always starts with the storyboard. With this very simple storyboard, I go on scouting trips to find places that would correspond to the drawings. I photograph or film shots and sequences from different perspectives. In my head and beforehand, I already identify the places but often I add other elements on site, details that I had not thought of.
Back in the studio, I frame the shots in relation to the storyboard, I add quickly sketched characters, I correct the color-grading, a little compositing, I print everything and that's where it becomes more fun. By drawing the characters on the prints, I can also alter the image with inks, paint in the shadows, have the most freedom with my equipment. Finally, I recapture these images frame by frame, to animate them in the final result. So many steps, but in the end we get a very tangible, very homogeneous result.
Monachopsis is available online on Liesbet van Loon’s website.
Beautiful Men
The Oscar Nominated short by Nicolas Keppens also got high praise from Anima’s jury last February. Beautiful Men, the story of three bald brothers heading to a hair transplant clinic in Turkey, received the Best Belgian Short Award in 2024.
Keppens’ third professional short — after Wildebeest and Easter Eggs, both multi-award winners in Belgium and internationally — and the first in stop motion impressed by both quality of animation and a touching story.
Steven, Koen and Bart all suffer from baldness. Together, they travel to Istanbul to benefit from hair implants. But in this hotel that they share willingly or unwillingly, it quickly becomes clear that they may have come for much more than a new haircut.
In the hushed atmospheres of a soft but extremely subtle stop motion, the relationship between the brothers evolves through funny misunderstandings and small everyday adventures. Until the dream invites itself into reality to remove the boundaries and bring the spaces together, creating universes where truths are revealed. A short with superbly crafted atmospheres, unveiled in lush sets and inhabited by puppets of impressive humanity. A poetry of men in full questioning, sensitive and complex as we like to see more and more on screen.
Beautiful Men is streaming for free on Arte with French and German subtitles. It’s also available online through Miyu Distribution’s website.
In other news…
As I was telling you at the beginning of this newsletter, The Animation Belgian now has a brand new visual identity, thanks to Belgian director Britt Raes!
We will soon talk more about her universe, from the Luce and the Rock world — and the upcoming series Luce and the Lovely Land — to the other creations of her quirky brain.
In the meantime, my podcast on Cinergie Les visages de l’animation is almost entirely published, so feel free to listen to these ten interviews diving deeper into the heart of Belgian animation making!
And, as we head into the final days of Anima, we may encounter each other in Flagey’s screening rooms.
If not, have a great animated weekend.
Kevin
Love the new logo and avatar! Looking forward to your conversation with Raes -- Luce is a film we really enjoyed, and we're excited to see where she goes with the series.