Animation First Festival ’25: New Francophone Shorts Second Program

As part of our coverage of Animation First Festival 2025, which celebrates Francophone film, we took a look at the second of their two short film programs. This year’s entrants followed a variety of themes, topics and styles, with the festival allowing artistic freedom to all those involved.

The entrants also showcase the diversity of Francophone cultures with projects from Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, Nederlands, and Germany, and even including Germanophone entrants in celebration of the amalgamated nuances of francophone cultures. There are notably no entrants from the Caribbean or Africa however, which is something the still-young festival might approach with intent in future programming. 

The two programs are also part of the Animation First Festival’s short film competition, which had the following results:

Best Francophone Short: Beautiful Men (dir. Nicolas Keppens)

Special Mention: VOLECEST (dir. Éric Briche)

Special Mention: Hurikán (dir. Jan Saska)

“LOCA” 

Dir. Vèronique Paquette, 2024

The second program opened with one of my favorites: a beautiful, strong Canadian piece rendered with grey and black ink waves that looks like an animation of something Saburo Murakami would’ve painted. The piece follows a woman who has a deeper inner grief, which we feel alongside her thanks to director Vèronique Paquette’s raw, dynamic style. Her grief crescendos into the revelation that no one outside of herself understands who she is, instead labeling her loca—insane. We get the reason for the title of the piece only after seeing the reality of the character, which juxtaposes the reality of her inner sorrow to this heavy four-letter word. This artistic choice heightens the emotional impact of the piece. We feel her perception of having been branded unfairly. We feel the anger that grows from her grief. 

The interesting thing about grief though is that it inspires inertia. Anger, on the other hand, inspires motion. When the woman’s anger emerges in the visual motif of what can only be described as oppressively violent needles, it spurs a kinetic new phase of the story. This motif evolves into whirling brush strokes and we understand something has changed in her. Then we slowly perceive another individual in her world. She’s dancing now and the tone of angst is beginning to dissipate—it was the angst of lonesomeness. The motion between brushstrokes adds dimensions of motion within shapes. The abstraction of the piece crystallizes into something with cubist, impressionist layers channeling her anger into self expression. The weighted lines at the end of the piece guide us to feel her new actualization. 

“Next?” 

Dir. Christel Guibert, 2024

This sincere, endearing Belgian piece somehow takes its time opening and developing a complete arc within its short runtime. The characters in the world of this film are anthropomorphic animals, similar to Bojack Horseman. The animal depicted by each character also captures their personality: a character with a cat’s head might be curious and mysterious, a character with a dog’s head might be expressive and jolly. You get the idea. 

Our main character is a moose? He doesn’t have antlers. He might be an ant-eater but his snout doesn’t really get narrower. I guess I’ll call him an ant-eater. And he develops a crush on a lady who’s… some kind of rodent? A shrew? We’ll go with a shrew. This piece’s biggest weakness might be how difficult it is to identify what its main characters are. On the other hand, this could also be its strength, since our inability to identify the characters forces us to unpack who they are by their behaviors alone. And make no mistake, this film’s strength is in showing, not telling. Its charm comes from its competence in illustrating fun, curious behaviors that you can instantly recognize as belonging to a certain animal without going to the obvious choices. “Oh my god, that is how a chameleon would enter a room!” (Spoiler: it’s not by changing colors.)

The story itself is full of sincerity. Its characters are seeking, yearning and vulnerable. They approach each other and their situations nonverbally, which leads to some evocative scenes and images as well as to some hilarious high jinks. This marked another favorite of mine from this year’s entrants.

“GiGi” 

Dir. Cynthia Calvi, 2024

This entry from France takes the underused approach of two people speaking with one another, not playing characters. The audio of this conversation is then accompanied with animation to heighten it. We are introduced to a woman describing her own voice as relieving, and it’s true. You actually do feel a sense of relief. There’s a comfortable sense of nonjudgement carried in the sound of her voice that you soon realize is intentional. We are hearing the voice of GiGi, a trans woman, speaking to another character named Calvi. 

She describes the personal journey of her life, navigating all of the confusing, gendered social constructs that make her, this animated mermaid, feel like the creature from the black lagoon. Her words told in her voice to the images of the animation bring you to a moving sort of empathy for her journey. Likewise, when she finally ends up where she started, when the destination reveals itself as the starting point of her journey, when she describes how she finally aligned her life with the state of being that she intuitively knew as a child, we feel her relief as well. Vicariously we feel her liberation and comfort. This piece’s ability to render our empathy is rooted in its emergent narrative. The animation essentially turns this cafe conversation into a voiceover fantasy story with a complete character arc.

"On Hold” 

Dir. Delia Hess, 2024

In her short film, director Delia Hess introduces us to the simple, relatable imagery of someone sitting in an office, waiting on hold on the phone. This Swiss and German piece explores the surreal feeling of waiting on hold while the world around you dissolves into a liminal space, drowned in the coffee overflowing from your cup. The film highlights the detachment and monotony of life in modernity by equating humans with sculptures and showing society being consumed by coffee, the potion of artificial wakefulness we need to get through our days.

Despite the unique conceit, the point could be made more prominently. At first pass, “On Hold” seems merely like a visualization of modern ennui. There’s very little for a viewer to grab on to, and at the risk of sounding overly harsh, the short feels like art that would go viral on LinkedIn. The visual style also resembles Corporate Memphis, an artistic choice simultaneously criticizing the role of corporate machines in driving our detachment while also imbuing this short with the unfortunate layer of irony that its semiotic content fits the aesthetic of minimally meaningful, big-budget corporate pacification.

“Flatastic” 

Dir. Alice Saey, 2024

Produced in France and the Netherlands, this story begins with a modern society—selfies, (not) Starbucks, cubicles, consumerism and littering. Everyone is faceless, though, emphasizing the hollow vanity of this society at the level of a collective. We spend some time with these unidentifiable masses before following a discarded shopping bag on a journey to the bottom of the ocean, where a manta ray mistakes it for a jellyfish and eats it. The manta ray dies and its species revolts against mankind, destroying our civilization before flattening us to resemble themselves. They usher us into the ocean where we live like schools of fish. “What an interesting story. Man I’ve never seen—” shut up. That’s just the first act. 

The rays go on to build their own society using the structures we left behind, engaging in all of the consumerism and vanity that we did, as well as in the cruelty of human experimentation. Eventually, humans rebel and end up equals with the rays. The result of the cycle of creation and destruction that the story alludes to is a perspective that’s bigger than humanity. It concerns life and nature. After humans, whichever species dominates the world using its ability to build tools and wield its intelligence will be the new eco-assholes, whether they’re ape-descended or not. Is it possible for a species to develop societies without creating a wake of natural destruction? “Flatastic” offers a novel and visually striking response to this idea. 

“Stuffed”

Dir. Louise Labrousse, 2024

This French short begins with a girl warming up some noodles and getting ready for a nice, hot bath. She takes a moment to hate her body before climbing into the tub. Another expression of frustration with her body leads her to drop the soup in her tub. She gets up and wipes the noodles off of herself, but one stubborn noodle remains protruding very noticeably from her vagina. She has a moment of reacting like we do, her face nonverbally asking, “How on Earth did that get there?” In a series of escalating moments, the girl calls the noodle disgusting, pulling on it until an impossible amount of noodles start falling out, accompanied with broth and chives and all the other things that were in her soup. This is turning into a Kafkaesque nightmare and the girl is terrified of what her body is doing. She squats over the toilet to try to avoid making a mess, until the soup spills out of it, floods the floor and completely submerges the room. Immersed in the reddish brown fluid flowing from her vagina that she only recently thought was disgusting, she has a beautiful moment. She smiles to herself, accepting that this is her soup and that it’s kind of nice when you embrace its warmth. 

The piece ends by evoking images that remind me of feminist artist Judy Chicago, especially her pieces Earth Birth and Snake Arm. Less of a story and more of a standing metaphor, more of an art piece, “Stuffed” is evocative and visceral.

“La Voix des Sirènes” 

Dir. Gianluigi Toccafondo, 2023

“La Voix des Sirènes,” or “The Voice of the Sirens,” is maybe the most memorable short from the second program, and another of my favorites from the festival. This French and Italian piece is visually denoted by constant flux. The images are as protean as the sea; even when a character isn’t moving the image is. The mixed media approach for this piece is a high-effort one that paid off. The end result is a story with visual dynamism serving its themes of discovery and wonder with images that stay with you long after the film ends.

The story opens with shifting images of various animals—fish, amphibians, reptiles—drawn to the voice of a blue siren. Her voice is a haunting shriek. She vomits a yellow infant with a voice like her own that she doesn’t like. She then vomits a pink infant with the voice of an angel. We get the familiar style of shifting images evoking some kind of marine predator that killing the mother. Before dying she vomits a star that floats into the night sky.

The children separate and grow, with the yellow siren ending up with legs to explore the wonders of the land, beautiful and bizarre. She confronts the danger of various land predators while the pink sister is captured by humans enamored with her voice. Pink vomits a blue bird and finds her sister. The short ends with the bird singing and soaring up toward the same sky that houses their mother’s star.

Along with discovery and curiosity, there is also the fascinating theme of the interplay between love and cruelty, danger and beauty. Sirens are predators, after all. They lure other animals to their deaths, like an angler fish whose light is its voice. But they are also subject to danger and cruelty. The young sirens find cruelty in other predators, yes, but also in their own mother, who likes one daughter more, and finally from humans. They meet all of these dangers by exploring the wonders of the ocean and land. The final image of the blue bird soaring seems to revel in the moment of grace in this nuanced microcosm of the beauty and suffering of life.

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