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:
“Don’t you know there are 200 temperance women in this county who control 200 votes. Why does a woman work for temperance? Because she’s tired of liftin’ that besotted mate of hers off the floor every Saturday night and puttin’ him on the sofa so he won’t catch cold. Tonight we’re for temperance. Help yourself to them cloves and chew them, chew them hard. We’re goin’ to that festival tonight smelling like a hot mince pie.”
—Laurence Stallings (1894–1968)
“Of all nature’s animated kingdoms, fish are the most unchristian, inhospitable, heartless, and cold-blooded of creatures.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”
—Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980)