The Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema (WFAC) is an annual international film festival for animated feature films, held in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The 11th edition, WFAC 2011, was held November 17–20, 2011 in Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada.
The festival was founded in 2001 (2001) to promote appreciation for animation as a narrative medium for mature cinematic storytelling, and to review and celebrate animated feature films in the venue they were meant to be seen: a theatre.
The festival is unique in its focus on feature animation. Its selection of films suggests a desire to create bridges: from audience to animator, from anime to non-anime, and most obviously from mature audiences to mature films, which simply happen to be animated. The programme is also surprisingly comprehensive - in its first year the festival was dedicated mainly to anime, but it has since become much more international. Perhaps reflecting its focus, WFAC has presented more animated feature films in public exhibition than any other festival in the world.
One interesting development since 2003 has been the festival's Tidbits programme, developed to search out and promote the creation of feature films by one single artist or very small groups, made possible by advancements in technology.
Famous quotes containing the words festival, animated and/or cinema:
“Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme, I have tried; I can find no rhyme to “lady” but “baby”Man innocent rhyme; for “scorn,” “horn”Ma hard rhyme; for “school,” “fool”Ma babbling rhyme; very ominous endings. No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinema ... has access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)