More than a thousand entries were reviewed by Daniel Šuljić, Antonia Begušić and Eugen Bilankov, putting together the ‘free and playful’ Animafest 2025 Student Film Competition. Among the less than 4% (40) selected titles in the competition for the Dušan Vukotić Award, in addition to traditional European ones, there is a strong presence of Far Eastern cinema, especially Chinese, but also Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese. The selection committee was particularly impressed by the body of new works from the Babelsberg Konrad Wolf Film University, which was therefore awarded the Best Animation School Award. In addition to Jelena Milunović’s Floating, which is also a Croatian co-production (Adriatic Animation), two other works from Babelsberg deserved to be presented in this prestigious competition. In I Am a Flower, the Berlin-based Indonesian filmmaker, Ariel Victor Arthanto, has created a colourfully intense, conceptually elaborate world of people-flowers who transform before the eyes of ordinary sapienses as a framework for a possible allegory of (self-)acceptance of identity, but also a fertile ground for observing a mother-child relationship. The ‘dissolving-disintegrating’ music video Opto Optics by Pearl Seemann, set to a song by the band Neumatic Parlo, plays with the geometries of interiors and metropolitan exteriors, creating avant-garde scenes of the protagonist’s consciousness in rapid change. It is a real eye candy, which can also be said of HIC SVNT DRACONES by Justin Fayard from ÉNSAD, who creates impressive and atmospheric scenes of icy wasteland in the always attractive technique of painting on glass.

AV spectacles also include the Chinese Bon Appetite (dir. Ziyu Wang, Jinhong Yu), a primarily purple-pink film about the eros and thanatos of flora and fauna. Partly made in the split-screen technique reminiscent of comic books, this is the second film by Gobelins graduate Ziyu Wang in the Student Film Competition after Funeral at Nine from 2023. Also using split-screen, HongYu Yue’s Urban Duo takes us to 3D Shanghai, where the low-intensity life of an old-fashioned father is juxtaposed with his son’s hectic, alienated yuppie lifestyle through a series of rotating cube sets. Also masterfully drawn, inspirationally framed and melancholically soundtracked is Lezhi Yu’s The Singing of Birds and What Is Drifting Away, about a girl’s blending reminiscences triggered by the death of a loved one, loneliness, bed linen and birds.

And just as Günter Grass peeled an onion, Taiwanese filmmaker NanTung Lin peels the skin off her fingers and dives into the memories of the self-destructive heroine of The Peel, dedicated to obsessive-compulsive behaviour. She does this with truly beautiful drawings and using animated embroidery, underlining the haptic nature of the entire film with sound. In Children of the Bird, Júlia Tudisco from Moholy-Nagy University portrays in bright colours the playful theogony and cosmogony of a world with “shifted” proportions, focusing on the experiences of two young deities. Given the dynamic creation and destruction, the first part of this mythopoetic film can also be understood as a dedication to the art of animation. Then, however, man comes and brings destruction to the environment, so the deities leave the world and the cycle starts again. Particularly interesting is the composition of individual scenes with respect to the flat aesthetics of Palaeolithic wall paintings, but also of folk and naïve art.

Awarded the Lotte Reiniger Prize at the Annecy Festival, Kerosene by Indian director Govinda Sao deals with the ever-relevant topic of the dynamics of male-female relationships and domestic violence in a deeply rooted patriarchy destructive for both sexes. In a poor family of a hairdresser and a factory worker with two small children, an argument first degrades to very harsh words, and then to brutal femicide (in the grey area between ‘the spur of the moment’ and ‘manslaughter’). With a brilliant sense of shadow and references to the Franco-Belgian school and Japanese animation, the difficult, tense and important film Kerosene is at the same time deeply immersed in the anthropological and ethnological context of rural India to which the author has devoted himself intensively. Lea Favre’s poignant puppet film Hunting also has a strong suggestion of realism in its depiction of a young documentary filmmaker who becomes a victim of sexual harassment. The inherent voyeurism and exploitation of observation thus turn against the protagonist, whom the viewer might previously have considered ‘a maniac’ herself. Although it is not entirely clear whether an audio recording of an assault aboard the bus is a document or simply brilliant voice acting, or whether Hunting is a form of artistic (self-)therapy, the juxtaposition of a dark screen and a disturbing assault is in any case an exceptionally thoughtful and functional procedure.

Uncompromising approaches to family contexts are also characteristic of other valuable student works. A rarely addressed topic and a unique aesthetic are to be found in Naomi Noir’s Mother’s Child from the Utrecht School of the Arts – on the one hand a very direct, on the other a surreal film about a mother caring for her son with special needs, struggling with an indifferent bureaucracy and fatigue. Also shown at the Berlinale, Mother’s Child was executed in a combination of 2D, 3D and drawings, raw animation, silhouettes, neon colours and ‘melting’ faces. Xiaoxuan Han presents Crow, Starfish and Unicorn, a black and white, also surreal allegory of family relationships whose strange ‘tubular’ characters are sometimes cruel, sometimes gentle, but always understandable in their fundamental motivations. The film relies in particular on the rhythm of physical, not always humorous gags, additionally strengthened by clever sound design, while its set design is impressively densely populated with quirky objects.

The Estonian film by the Cypriot author nominated for the ASIFA Student Award, Poppy Flowers by Evridiki Papaiakovou, was created by drawing and scratching on a 35mm film strip and is dedicated to the memory of a mother and her pious worldview, as well as a daughter’s separation from it. Iranian filmmaker Shadab Shayegan’s graduate film at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, Pear Garden, is the story of a girl’s visit to her grandmother, who has just undergone a mastectomy. Confused, the little girl tries to ‘restore order’ with the help of her grandmother’s shadow and pears. Seemingly ‘childlike’, the aesthetics of the film is actually a complex mixed-media creation based on silhouettes, flatness, unconventional perspectives and backgrounds made of different materials. Mariana Mendivil, on the other hand, collages videos, photographs and cut-outs of memory in a Mexican experimental film essay with a distinctively ‘retro’ texture Memory of a Displaced Body dedicated to the feeling of being uprooted from space of origin, family and body. The puppet film JUDY1964 in one continuous shot over meticulous set touches on the theme of the popularisation of weapons through children’s toys (thankfully in the past), but also hides a terrible secret. Author Marie-Hélène Van Thuyne was a member of the stop-motion team behind last year’s Animafest Grand Prix winner Hotel Miracle.

Beyond the context of family and personal identity, some filmmakers have also offered a broader socio-critical approach. From the famous Bauhaus University comes Anya Ryzhkova’s 09.01.berkovich, an engaging collage film about theatre director Yevgeniya Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, victims of the Putin regime accused of ‘public incitement to terrorism’ (based on the staging of the theatre play Finist, the Brave Falcon) and sentenced to six years in prison. The film is based on Berkovich’s poetic address to the court. Sublime by a group of French authors from the Piktura school relies on bony puppets, fantastic 3D design and handheld camera to comment on the exploitative nature of contemporary beauty imperatives that gradually turn into full-blooded horror in which the body is sacrificed on the catafalque of performance. The film thus places all types of exposure of the starved and sunken body and the plastic face in the context of coercion, i.e. pornography, consumption and murder. The American film (CalArts) Take Me Drunk I’m Home by the California-based Chicago-born director Nolan Downs is an alcoholic Americana soaked in beer, cringe jokes and middle-class purposelessness that stands out with its ingenious visualisation of drunkenness and slightly grotesque design. The meticulous 3D design of space, objects and the insectoid protagonist who devours, digests and transforms them in the suburbs of Bratislava is the trump card of Overture by Jakub Hronský from the Prague UMPRUM school. It’s easy to understand the film as a criticism of consumerism or a commentary on environmental destruction, but perhaps it is best to simply surrender to its slightly creepy atmosphere of open symbolism.

Many young filmmakers have also devoted themselves to the unlimited possibilities of animated perspective. A dizzying combination of stop-motion animated wall and digital drawings, subjective shots, and voice-overs by an emotionally torn protagonist enliven a room in Lisa Bayr’s Laute Stille. Laura Kohler’s Swiss mountain-musical caricature In Tune, which itself seems a bit ‘retro’ in its evocation of classic animation cartoonists with perspective ‘stretches’ of characters and space, follows the clash of a young musician with Alpine tourists who drive her crazy. Gabriella Sacco’s miniature loop Portrait of a Mute Man also creatively rethinks perspective, using the freedom of the 3D camera to conjure up the erratic flight of a fly. Accompanied by a twisted waltz, the film is a metaphor of gibberish. Trash by a group of authors from the French school ESMA, through an action-packed showdown between a rat and a pigeon, compresses slices of the life of a run-down apartment complex, revealing its spiritualy depraved tenants. Using a dynamic camera that can reach into every hole, Trash also offers the unique perspectives inherent in animated film and a palpably repulsive depiction of filth and homelessness. Martin Bonnin’s graduation film from La Poudrière Between the Gaps is perhaps the most obvious indicator of the distinctive power of animated film – in this case, its ability to provide a unique depiction of urban bustle, disorientation and alienation, smoothly occupying the artistic positions and parallels that are not available to other genres.

Red Meat by Eleni Aerts is the story of the mythological monstrous giant Geryon, who was killed by Heracles while stealing his cattle, and was described by Hesiod, Aeschylus and Stesichorus. Although Aerts depicts this episode, she primarily uses the verse novel Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, in which Geryon is distinguished by his unconventional perception of his surroundings and his place in the world. His transformations are performed in the style of raw animation and accompanied by partly atonal and partly choral music in this interesting animated dialogue with antiquity through contemporary poetry. The Chinese film Sh by Qi Duan brings together various scenes of stress, relaxation and unfettered imagination (of mostly physical nature) in the context of urban life, thus addressing contemporary spaces of freedom ‘between reality and illusion’. Qi Duan studied oil painting, which is also strongly felt in her 2D expression. The film with the cryptic title LDN 51.5072N 0.1276W by Malaysian filmmaker Wen Pey Lim (produced by British RCA) is an experimental deconstruction of London’s industrial architecture with geometric dance and a slight suggestion of glitch art to the sounds of piano accompaniment.

Animation students, after all, do not lack a sense of humour. Adaptation of a poem by the Latvian poet Kārlis Vērdiņš Cleanliness by Andrejs Brīvulis collects the impressions of one day in the life of a gay man strongly focused on smells, images, product declarations and hygiene imperatives. The final appearance of the dysfunctional partner gives a more serious dimension to his mechanical-alienated and therefore darkly humorous adventures, and the value of the film also lies in the skilful handling of motifs as symbolic representations and narrative ellipses. The Japanese film Love★Star by Taiwanese director Tzuting Lee, made with classic paper drawings, is a bittersweet, endearing allegory of unrequited love with humorous elements of merging high and popular culture (cosmogony and human passion with the typology of friends, board and card games, zombies and TV programs, but also the characteristic anime character design with artistic landscapes). From Sèvres, on the other hand, comes the collage-drawn-painted parodic ‘IKEA melodrama’ Jeanne & Jean Jean, about a couple whose love is put to the test when it comes to interior design and furniture purchase. With elements of a musical and French humour, Thanys Martin’s film nevertheless also touches on serious themes of social pressure and paranoia from drowning in the stereotype of family life.