The Animation Showcase: Annecy 2026 Highlights Collection

The Animation Showcase, which is a great streaming resource of various animated shorts and features available to people working in entertainment (and, obviously, particularly in animation), is currently hosting a program of animated shorts that played at Annecy this year. It's a fantastic collection, all of them very much worth checking out. I imagine some of these will crop up during awards season -- I know at least Gauze has already qualified for the Oscars.

Speaking of, first up is Gauze, which immediately caught my eye with its beautiful art style. I always gravitate toward movies that look like this, rich 2-D with strong lines and expressive faces, finding a nice balance between the weight of reality and the expressionistic freedom of the form.

Gauze is about two Palestinian brothers who struggling, like so many of their countrymen, to survive. Zain is 14 years-old, and is a former champion swimmer. During the film, we get a couple brief flashes to that life, a life that is sadly long gone, and hard to imagine coming back. Now, he spends his days trying to find food for his younger brother Nour, who has lost a hand in the carnage of the attempted genocide.

Gauze

We meet Zain trying to get food from an aid worker who doesn't have nearly enough to go around. He returns home empty-handed, but a second chance arrives in the form of an air drop. Unfortunately, these provisions land in the sea, much to the chagrin of the people gathered on the shore. Following the lead of a few others, and tapping back into his swimming prowess, Zain makes for one of the packages, swimming with all his might in the hopes of getting something to eat that night.

It's a harrowing tale that taps into the tragedy and the humanity of what is happening in Palestine, and the way that so many facts of day-to-day life have been given an edge, a darkness. What was once a joyful pastime for Zain is now a means for survival. That the film is based on true events makes it all the more impactful. It's a timely, moving tale.

Uka-uka refers to an Estonian children's game, and is the name of another memorable short. The film revolves around young Juhan, a pudgy and friendless boy who seems to live on the precipice of a shifting world. It's 2001. Estonia has won Eurovision, which is expected to help lead the country to a 6% increase in its GDP. But Juhan also overhears conversations about darker things, like funeral planning and deportations to Siberia. It's a world in flux, made all the more confusing (and maybe exciting) when seen through the eyes of youth.

Juhan lives with his grandparents, and all he really wants to do is play his online fantasy game, where he slays huge monsters and sells their bones to other players in the marketplace. Fingers crossed Grandma doesn't make a phone call, cutting the internet connection in a snap.

Uka-uka

The film has such a strong sense of time and place, with a sense of a much larger world, one that might contain unknown dangers for little Juhan. As the title suggests, part of the film involves him playing an eventful game of hide-and-seek, one that he and his grandparents will never forget.

I will always go to bat for stop-motion animation, and this is a fantastic example of the medium, with strong designs and a kind of uncanny quality, like you're looking at a barely stylized caricature. Some of the textures are so legible you feel like you could reach out and touch them, and not just the ones you expect. I don't know why, but I found the realistic smoothness of the human skin quite startling. A real looker, this.

Pretty early in my viewing of God is Shy, I realized I was watching something I would never forget. It is such a stunning short, visceral and strange and singular. It feels like nothing I've ever seen before. Got under my skin, made said skin crawl, the kind of thing where you want to cover your eyes but you also don't want to look away lest you miss something. This is such a special movie.

Ariel and Paul are two friends on a train trip, both artists, and they decide to play a game where they draw their greatest fears. Or frights, rather, something that would scare them viscerally. So not like, public speaking or something like that. Paul goes first, drawing a scenario where he's in deep, dark water and sees a half-submerged woman's face coming toward him. Ariel's also draws on women and water (the two things we all come from, she later notes), imagining a frightening woman lying in her bathtub when she gets up to pee in the middle of the night.

God is Shy

Then things start to get strange. The woman Ariel has drawn boards the train and sits across from the friends. She notes the drawing, and the startling resemblance. That's me, she says. And further, That's the pattern of my shower curtain. Chilling.

After an explanation of the game, the woman launches into her own horror story, a disturbing brush with the divine that brought her to the brink of understanding human existence, but left her wanting. I won't say more than that, but things get very upsetting.

The animation here is so key to why the film works, with the characters' exaggerated features, discolored eyes. Like, just looking at it, you get the sense that something isn't right, that things are going to get even less right. It's a stunner through-and-through, just an absolute home run by writer-director Jocelyn Charles. One of my favorite shorts I've seen this year/in quite a while.

Lately, one of the constants in my life is the Nintendo Switch version of Wingspan, a popular board game in which you attempt to build the "best" bird sanctuary by playing birds, gathering food, and laying eggs. It's a phenomenal game with great presentation in its video game form: beautiful music, simple animations, and no need to wrangle all the tiny pieces.

All my Wingspan hours probably primed me to be especially receptive to Lake Messejana, which follows the egrets living at the eponymous lake in the year 2040, struggling to carve out a little corner of nature that can remain theirs as human construction encroaches on their terrain. Buildings are being erected, as is a massive mermaid statue on one of the rocks. Huge equipment is rolling in. There's trash everywhere, getting tangled in the grass.

Lake Messejana

Animation is often used to tell stories like this, ones that damn humanity's carelessness toward nature, the never-satisfied consumption that pushes wildlife into smaller and smaller preserves. It's the perfect medium for such tales and such messages, because we're able to get into the animals' POVs, fly and dive right alongside them, find the rhymes of our human emotions in their wild visages. 

Lake Messejana is a powerful punch of a film. The visuals are stunning and dynamic, and by the end, even mythical, suggesting a power in nature that we could never comprehend, nor compete with. The music has a rolling war rally quality to it, a call to action for all of animal-kind to resist and revolt, It suggests that something is coming, something big that these capitalist pigs can't anticipate. It's haunting.

Because Today is Saturday is another of my favorites of this bunch. This is one of the most compelling cinematic depictions of motherhood I've seen. It tackles subjects that we've seen handled before -- the mother having to handle everything, the kids being ungrateful/unaware, the husband being borderline no help at all -- but renders it in a way I've never seen before. This character is constantly giving of herself: pulling food, toys, cleaning supplies, and dozens of other things out of her head, stomach, and other body parts. She is a constant source of creation. Just as she carried her two children, so now she carries every little thing within her that they need to survive, that the household needs to stay in order.

Because Today is Saturday

And she also carries a vibrant inner self, a side of herself that wants to get out, breathe, stretch her legs, read a book, soak in the tub. The film is sort of a battle between motherhood and personhood, the tug-of-war as this woman tries to find a moment to bask in silence and stillness, and the way life (i.e., her family) doesn't let her do so. Nothing is hers, but everything is her responsibility.

Once in a while, the inner self emerges, a ghostly double of the woman, and it almost feels like a love story: these two women trying to reunite and spend time together, grasping at the straws of life beyond the endless march of chose, cooking, cleaning, childrearing, etc. It's a fantastic take on everything mothers do, and everything they give up, to keep the world spinning round. As a certified Mama's Boy, it moved me tremendously.

The final short in the program is one of the toughest to watch: What We Leave Behind. The film reminded me a lot of one of my favorite animated features of recent years, The Missing. Like that film, What We Leave Behind grapples with the lingering damage and trauma of childhood sexual abuse, the scars victims carry, the way they move through the world while also often simultaneously still inhabiting those past moments.

Here, our protagonist is Dan, who was the victim of abuse by his hockey coach when he was young. Now an adult, Dan has a massive gash in his neck. If he doesn't have a scarf holding everything together, his head is prone to fall to one side, accompanied by a sickening squelch. (On the note of sickening squelches, one of the best parts of this short is the superb sound design, which is intense, visceral, stomach-turning. Whether it's the body sounds, the clattering of metal, the swoosh of swinging objects...the film is an assault on the ears in the best possible way).

Dan's neck obviously prevents him from speaking, and the film follows him as he explores, in silence, the childhood space of the hockey arena, which is due to be demolished soon: the Horrible Place, the site of so much pain, a palace of unwanted memories. We watch as Dan navigates both that space and the space of his memories, in which we see a haunting, ghoulish recreation of what he experienced as a kid. It's painful to watch, and executed with exquisite artistry: the coach's fat fingers becoming creatures unto themselves as they wriggle into the locker where Dan hides, the stripping away of his adult skin to reveal the boy inside, still wounded, still feeling shame and confusion.

The film ends on a poetic note (again, somewhat on the same wavelength of The Missing), signaling hope for victims as they speak their truth and build their lives (and their very selves) back in the aftermath of such horrible experiences. It was a heavy watch to end this series on, but a very good one, too.