North America’s largest animation event hits middle age with a new poster designed by Michael Zavacky.
OTTAWA, ON -- The legendary Ottawa International Animation Festival celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Despite being one of the oldest animation events in the world, the Festival promises to feel as young and vibrant as ever.
This year’s event, which runs from September 21-25, 2016, will be a mixture of past, present and future. To start things off, the release of the OIAF 16 poster. Fittingly, organizers turned to a dynamic local artist Michael Zavacky (responsible for numerous popular campaign ads for the OIAF during the last few years) to come up with something bold and fresh that would honor our past.
“It was a great honor to be asked to design the OIAF 40th anniversary poster and I really wanted to create something that paid tribute to the long and illustrious history of this amazing event,” says Zavacky. “I also wanted to design something that people who attend OIAF would hopefully appreciate and enjoy exploring. So I started packing it full visual references to characters and objects that have played a starring role in the history of OIAF. It's a veritable ‘Where's Waldo’ of things to find and try to identify.”
The OIAF also announced that for the first time in its history there will be screenings of every Grand Prize winning film since 1976. “True to the OIAF’s edgy, eclectic nature,” says OIAF artistic director Chris Robinson, “the winners include a mix of animation classics (e.g. The Street, The Man Who Planted Trees, The Wrong Trousers, Ryan), controversial choices (e.g. Jerzy Kucia’s Chips at Ottawa 82, Igor Kovalyov’s Hen, His Wife from Ottawa 90 and last year’s winner, Small People with Hats), along with an assortment of innovative picks that have helped solidify the OIAF as a festival that dances to its own beat.”
Many of the Festival’s previous Grand Prize winners will also be in attendance, including Igor Kovalyov, who has won the Festival's top award an unprecedented three times. The Festival has also commissioned a number of international animation historians, programmers and critics to write essays about each of the winning films.
The OIAF40 Grand Prize retrospective will take up six distinct, chronological screenings during this year’s Festival. Full details and more programming announcements will be available soon.
Source: Ottawa International Animation Festival
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
