The 7th LIAF opens on Monday August 30 with the UK premiere of British animation legend Phil Mulloy’s debut feature Goodbye Mister Christie at the Curzon Renoir. A far departure from traditional, fluffy children’s animation, Mulloy’s film is unashamedly dark and deliberately crude. It tells the story of an everyday suburban family whose lives are shattered when Mr Christie is shown having sex with a French sailor on television. As a subversive trip through one family’s personal hell, Goodbye Mister Christie sets the tone for a programme filled with unusual and provocative animated cinema.
Elsewhere the festival will be focusing on various animation disciplines and techniques, including ‘scratch’ film, a painstaking process of scratching directly onto film stock to create original pieces of moving art. Showcasing some of the finest examples of this innovative technique on August 30, audiences will be treated to both historical classics and recently released scratch films.
The loveable form of Felix The Cat might be more familiar to patrons of this year’s LIAF, and the organisers have trawled through the archives to present a selection of memorable and lesser seen Felix cartoons from the classic era of New York animation. The Horse Hospital in Russell Square is the place to be for all Felix fans on Sunday September 5.
As well as these highlights, the festival will host British showcases, children’s favourites, an Animate TV retrospective and numerous animated docs, features and shorts between August 27 and September 5.
Tickets for LIAF 2010 and full programme details are available now at liaf.org.uk
London International Animation 2010 – Preview (text) by Adam Woodward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
