Fantoche
A selection from the International Competition
At Fantoche 2026, short animated films open up unfamiliar worlds in just a few minutes. Giuseppe Di Salvatore introduces a selection from the International Competition, followed by seven films that he and Eugénie Bouquet found particularly inspiring.
Introduction
A matter of brevity
The demanding technique of animation makes brevity a typical trait of animated films. A style is pushed to its expressive limits through minimalism. Animated films therefore often provide intense and explosive experiences. With few elements, they build fantastic situations in which recurrence becomes a mark of familiarity within unfamiliar worlds.
Hallucinations
On this basis, short animated films are often trips in the sense of hallucinatory journeys – a mythological and cosmic journey in Clara Trevisan’s Mother of Dawn (BRA 2025, 8’), an exhilarating and osmotic one in Sacha Beeley’s Babyface (UK 2026, 6’). At the 2026 edition of the Fantoche Festival in Baden, it was in Xie Li’s A Taste of Beer (CHN 2025, 6’) that I found the most provocative oddity that the hallucinatory paths of animated films can convey.
Miniatures
Brevity can take the shape of concentration, as it does in miniatures – and in Marcel Barelli’s Nonna Lucia (CH 2026, 7’), where obsolete objects can awaken memories as well as history. Another form of miniature appears in Atsushi Wada’s Little Boarlet (JAP 2026, 4’), where a playful little boar provides an occasion to question conventional situations. Or in Markus Tangre’s Ivar (NOR 2025, 4’), where a sharp series of psychological observations helps depict a single, difficult feeling: the love and hate between an elderly couple.
I’ll tell you…
A further minimalist strategy in animated films is to build the visual layer on a documentary recording: an interview, a report or a witness’s account. Although they may appear to serve an educational purpose, both Ulysse Patrick Thevenot’s Ce n’est pas sale (FR 2025, 4’) and Erwann Hette’s Scratch (FR 2025, 8’) achieve powerful results: the former raises awareness of homophobia, while the latter encourages understanding of autistic children.
A selection of seven
by Eugénie Bouquet (EB) and Giuseppe Di Salvatore (GDS)
Here are the films that the two film critics attending the festival in Baden found most inspiring.
A Sisyphean task, a hypnotic spiral, a play of variations, a cyclical movement that reconnects us with the seasons and nature, an atmosphere of suspension, the feeling of being stuck in an impasse or liberated from destiny. All of these interpretations and feelings surface while watching Sujin Min’s West Wind, which makes repetition its rhythmic principle. There is a visual connection between the protagonist, a woman, the objects around her and the natural elements. The environment becomes an expressive tool for her state of mind. At the same time, the act of drawing itself is staged through the shaping and reshaping of scenes and landscapes. West Wind therefore also has a self-reflexive dimension: it can be read as a figurative expansion of the animator’s own work. GDS
Sujin Min | KOR 2026 | 16’
More Info
When Shari is told that her cancer is terminal, she finds herself alone, facing an insurmountable task: breaking the news to her family. Overwhelmed by the cruelty of the situation, the young woman is visited by a companion with an equally tragic fate: Laïka, the dog astronaut.
In her short film Im Auto Tapes und Butterbrot, director Kiana Naghshineh explores the confrontation with death with rare tenderness, contrasting the love that unites the members of Shari’s family with the indifference of the universe. The film juggles dizzying shifts in scale – from the very small, Shari’s failing cells, to the very large, the Milky Way where Laïka has vanished – with touching elegance.
The sound design adds to this carefully crafted sense of dissonance: the impossibility of making sense of the universe’s absurdity, except by simply being there for one another. A striking reminder of life’s fragility, the film deeply moved audiences at the Fantoche Festival and earned the 2026 Audience Award. EB
Kiana Naghshineh | DE 2025 | 14’
More Info
The protagonist of Decay is not simply filmmaker Juan Camilo González himself, telling the story of his relationship with animation and the long process of grieving his father’s violent disappearance. The film’s real protagonist is the passage of time, through which grieving and the act of animating find a shared means of expression. Old drawings and their subsequent animation embody, respectively, the past and the difficult path of memory. The impossibility of reanimating the dead and the possibility of animating memory go hand in hand. In this way, the film brings complex temporal and visual layers together with an almost linear narrative. GDS
Juan Camilo González | COL 2025 | 7’
More Info
After dumping her obnoxious boyfriend, who is obsessed with The Lord of the Rings, a young woman turns into a gorgon and rediscovers her freedom. But between her friends’ baby showers and the horror of dating sites, the reality of being single in her thirties soon catches up with her and brings her down. Is it possible to love yourself when you feel like you’re turning into an old hag?
With this short film and its biting humour, director Anna Ginsburg paints an honest and warm portrait of a young woman who feels herself ageing, and of all the anxieties surrounding this period of transition. The tone manages to be both contemporary and personal, particularly through an experimental visual style that does not seek to overly aestheticise its protagonist. It allows her to resemble the hideous creature she feels herself becoming – and is perceived to be – simply because she has the audacity to grow older. A joyful and sincere film that pulls no punches when it comes to challenging societal expectations and offers comfort to all those who see themselves as monsters. EB
Anna Ginsburg | UK 2025 | 17’
More Info
If Roy Andersson’s films wink at puppet theatre and animation maquettes, Anna Mantzaris’ Please seems to wink at Andersson’s world of desolation, where human relationships are drained by individualism, cynicism and depression. Thanks to an intriguing construction of parallel stories, whose humorous turns we follow, Please is able to break through its protagonists’ loneliness and selfishness and introduce a crescendo of love. The order of a bureaucratised world gives way to a sweet chaos, with liberating moments of violence or confrontation. A perfectly mastered animated film, without redundancy or hesitation, it establishes Anna Mantzaris as a mature and accomplished artist. GDS
Anna Mantzaris | CZ-FIN-SUE-NOR-FR 2026 | 9’
More Info
To pass the time on a train ride, two illustration students play a game of drawing their greatest fears. When the woman who haunts one of the students’ dreams comes to sit across from them, the nightmare has only just begun.
With his new short film, Jocelyn Charles enters the realm of horror with great intensity and remarkable mastery of suspense. The visual aesthetic he has developed is particularly fitting, employing stiffness and a highly organic style of movement that evoke rotoscoping and anchor the film between reality and the uncanny. At the same time, the shimmering colours and characters with exaggerated features allow the film to shift into a dreamlike and supernatural realm. This is particularly effective when the film aims to send chills down the spine.
The result is a disconcerting film whose images linger in the mind long after the credits roll. EB
Jocelyn Charles | FR 2025 | 16’
More Info
Tal Gadon’s technique uses paper, light and silhouettes, with the archaic flair of shadow theatre. The virtuosic 11-minute film consists of one scene and one long “shot” – if we can call it that in animation – in which minimal figures convey a clear story without dialogue. The story explores the meeting of rural and modern worlds through bicycles travelling up and down a steep hill. Bikes carrying chickens cross paths with racing bikes in competitions covered on television. Electricity and its wires radically change the rural idyll, awakening individualistic desires and bringing about the destruction of the rural community. GDS
Tal Gadon | PT 2026 | 11’
More Info
