It’s that time of the year again: the Göteborg Film Festival närmar sig and I find myself eagerly browsing through the programme in search of new animated movies to watch with the friends and colleagues I have dragged into this yearly activity.

I’m not looking for major children’s cartoon productions. Rather, I am interested in the kind of animation I was first exposed to back in (probably) 2012 at Rabbitfest, in Perugia. I am forever grateful that my hometown used to (sigh!) have such a unique festival, entirely dedicated to independent animation and, for once1, mostly targeting adults. It introduced me to what for me was a completely new genre, and I enjoyed it to the point that it inspired me to organize a cineforum2 at my high school.

Before the beginning of this year’s edition of the festival, I want to share some of the memorable independent animated feature films3 I have watched until now. I might update this list in the future.

Persepolis (2007)

This is by far the most well-known movie on this list. My family borrowed it from the library right after we read Marjane Satrapi’s homonymous graphic novel, well before Rabbitfest was a thing. To this days, this is both one of the best comics I’ve ever read and one of the best animated movies I’ve ever watched. Persepolis is an autobiographical drama tracing the recent history of Iran. What I enjoy the most in Satrapi’s work is the storytelling, but I remember being impressed with the animation too. Already in 2007, frame-by-frame animation on paper was quite the exception. Plus, just like the graphic novel it is based on, the movie is in black and white. Watching it, it really felt like the character from the comic were coming to life.

Mary and Max (2009)

I watched Mary and Max at my first Rabbitfest and never rewatched it since, but I clearly remember it as one of the heaviest films of my teen years. I somehow visually associate it with Pixar’s Up, (which I have never watched the in its entirety), even if the former is in stop-motion and the latter computer-animated (turns out the premiered in the same year). Mary and Max is however a much darker movie, dealing with depression, anxiety and alcoholism, all through the story of a long-distance friendship between a lonely eight-year-old girl and a middle-aged autistic adult (so much for those who say animation isn’t well suited for serious matters!). I do not remember how the movie ends.

Alois Nebel (2011)

Like Persepolis, Alois Nebel is a dramatic black-and-white animated feature film based on a comic book (by Jaroslav Rudiš and Jaromír 99). Unlike Satrapi’s story, however, Alois Nebel is a historical novel and the movie is animated with rotoscoping. The result is visually stunning and perfectly complemented by a beautiful soundtrack, by the Czech rock band Priessnitz.

Crulic: the path to beyond (2011)

Crulic was my first animated documentary, telling the story of a Romanian man who died while on a hunger strike after being unjustly arrested for thefth in Poland. This is a difficult-to-watch movie, but also one worth watching. Here, animation, which largely consists of animated photographs, becomes the perfect tool to tell a real but underdocumented story.

The island (2021)

10 years after watching Crulic in Perugia, I went for this movie at the Gothenburg Film Festival because I remembered the director’s name, Anca Damian. Although also dealing with a difficult theme (in this case, immigration), The Island is a completely different work: a chaotic, psychedelic musical that left me moderately confused. Still, not easy to forget.

Flee (2021)

Flee is a documentary/animated interview, recounting the life of an Afghan refugee in Denmark. Animation-wise, this is really nothing special (actually, I’d say visuals are barely acceptable for such a recent movie), but it does contribute to make the content more accessible, for instance to a younger (teen) audience. Together with Cinema Pameer (a splendid Swedish documentary about an Afghan cinema), this was my favorite movie at the 2021 (online) edition of the Göteborg Film Festival.

Aurora’s sunrise (2022)

Aurora’s sunrise is again a documentary about the Armenian Genocide survivor Aurora Mardiganian. While this is not one of my personal favorites, the story told in this movie is truly unbelievable and the animation objectively very well done.

Blind willow, sleeping woman (2022)

As a keen Haruki Murakami reader, I could not miss the movie adaptation of six of his short stories. Interestingly, this is not a collection of shorts, and, at least to some extent, the stories blend with each other. As dreamlike as the original, this movie definitely works in my opinion, but it might be a bit boring for those uninitiated to Murakami’s writing.

My love affair with marriage (2022)

Last but definitely not least, Signe Baumane’s My love affair with marriage might be one of my favorite movies, not just within weird independent animation for adults, not just within animation in general, but overall; all this while not at all being the most aesthetically appealing in this list. Baumane has Satrapi’s self-awareness and Zerocalcare4’s ability to sdrammatizzare5. In this movie, she deals with gender roles with a mix brilliant narrative devices and brutal realism, plus some neuroscience. Guess I’ll have to watch everything else she does.

  1. While this is slowly changing, 10 years ago, at least in Italy, comics and animation were still considered something childish and definitely not viable media for addressing important issues ↩

  2. I am only now learning that this word doesn’t exist in English. I would count on the readers’ perspicacity, but just in case, here is the meaning (cf. definition 1) ↩

  3. I am explicitly excluding shorts and children’s movies here, not because I have anything against them, but, on the contrary, because I don’t want this list to grow disproportionately: I have seen too many good ones ↩

  4. Another one who recently did great animation for adults, unfortunately not yet on the big screen ↩

  5. s + drammatizzare, literally un + dramatize, “lower (usually through irony) the degree of dramaticiness of a tragic event”. Commonly translated as downplay, but I think the English word has a much more negative connotation. ↩