The International Animated Film Showcase of Catalunya presents a retrospective selection about Surrealism and another about Mexican Animation.

- Ron Diamond, founder of the Acme Filmworks studio in Hollywood, will explain, in a special session, the relationship that exists between independent animation, commercial production and advertising.


Once more, ANIMAC offers a new opportunity to enjoy the thousand and one faces making up the international arena of animated cinema. The tenth ANIMAC, organized by the Lleida City Council and the ICIC (The Catalan Institute of Cultural Industries) part of the Generalitat of Catalunya, will take place from the 2nd to the 5th of March 2006.

ANIMAC is a non competitive showcase created to exhibit the best animated film productions ever, with special attention paid to those productions that have most served to enrich and strengthen the expressive ability of animated film. It is also a fundamental meeting point for professionals in this area.

Surrealism

This tenth edition of ANIMAC seems like a good time to reflect on the main reason artists find themselves attracted to this discipline, which is none other than the creative freedom that animation provides, through its capacity to make dreams come alive through play. Play that allows for the possibility to discover, one’s own inner thoughts through images, recovering in doing so, the surrealist spirit from the past and from the present.

That’s why this year, ANIMAC presents a series of programmes and will use them to try to reconstruct both the universe and the time when this artistic phenomenon first appeared as well as the reasons why it has lasted up until the present time. ANIMAC presents sections that span:
- literary interpretations of surrealist authors.
- Avantgarde film productions made in the periods between wars.
- a panorama of classic cartoons
- the present through the eyes of Czech animator Jan Svankmajer and his followers.

Mexico

A selection of animation pieces on the meaning of death in Mexico. Different visions of what Octavio Paz called “invisible realities”, that show the fusion of two forms of culture living together, Christian and Aztec. In this section, several Mexican animators show us their vision of the fascination that Mexican culture has with death.

Ron Diamond: Animation author in the advertising industry.

Ron Diamond has been the impetus behind important initiatives for the integration of artistic animation into the growing animation market all over the world. After working as a producer for Max Media and MTV, he created his own production company, Acme, in 1990. Located in Hollywood, Acme Filmworks was created with the intention of melding two worlds that are traditionally separate, the art of animation and advertising, inviting talented, award winning, animation artists to make films for the advertising market. Today, Acme has over 40 internationally renown animators in its group, amongst them, Michael Dukok de Wit, Paul Driessen and Bill Plympton, who create small works of art in a commercial format for some of the biggest companies in the world, like United Airlines or Microsoft.