Why Annecy Has Become an Essential Stop on My Festival Calendar

When people ask me what my favorite film festival is, I know what they expect to hear: something upscale and exclusive, like Venice or Cannes, with their red carpet premieres and interminable standing ovations, where the winning filmmaker goes home with a golden something-or-other, be it a lion, a bear or the Palme d’Or.

What they don’t expect to hear is that the top stop on my travel calendar is, in fact, Annecy, which isn’t a traditional film festival at all, but more of a cross between Comic-Con and Cannes, dedicated entirely to animation.

Personally, I believe that animation is the purest form of cinema there is. Unlike the vast majority of filmmaking, where you point a camera at something that exists — what we think of as “live action” — with animation, you start with a blank page (or screen), and everything that appears on it must be drawn, sculpted or invented whole cloth. From “Snow White” to stop-motion, everything is extrapolated directly from the imagination, as artists use a mind-boggling number of ways to cheat the impression that their creations are alive.

It’s magic. And Annecy is the festival that honors that wizardry best, dedicating a week to every kind of animation you can imagine — long and short, whether made for the big screen or small. It doesn’t matter if it’s primitively rendered by hand or cutting-edge computer-assisted fare, all are welcome, with so many surprising variations in between (from Michel Ocelot’s paper cutout style to the living painting approach of “Loving Vincent”).

A few decades ago, animation might have seemed like a niche sliver of the overall film industry, perhaps even a dying medium. The golden age of Disney was behind us, and animation divisions at DreamWorks and Warner Bros. were struggling. But ever since Pixar revolutionized the form, demonstrating the “to infinity and beyond” potential of computer animation with “Toy Story” 30 years ago,…