{"id":658637,"date":"2026-05-08T23:02:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T23:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/658637\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T23:02:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T23:02:09","slug":"all-the-animation-at-the-2026-cannes-film-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/658637\/","title":{"rendered":"All the Animation at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like most of the major film<\/a> festivals, Cannes<\/a> has had an up-and-down history with its representation of animation. There have been some strong years for the medium, and one must never forget that \u201cShrek 2\u201d competed for the Palme d\u2019Or in 2004, but there have been other years where the animated offerings at the Croisette have been a touch scarce.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Recently though, Cannes has become a bit of an unexpected launch pad for animated movies hoping to translate prestige and positive reviews into Oscar glory. In 2024 \u201cFlow,\u201d a tiny independent Latvian feature in the Un Certain Regard section, was able to translate raves (including\u00a0from IndieWire<\/a>) into awards buzz that steadily built throughout the year into a surprising but delightful Best Animated Feature win at the Academy Awards. Last year, nothing much had a chance in the face of \u201cKPOP Demon Hunters,\u201d but two Cannes premieres \u2014 \u201cArco\u201d<\/a> and \u201cLittle Am\u00e9lie or the Character of Rain\u201d<\/a> \u2014 were able to make it all the way to nominations.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"CANNES,<\/a> \"Liam<\/a> <\/p>\n

This year\u2019s Cannes,\u00a0which begins May 12 and wraps on May 23,\u00a0only has a handful of animated features to look forward to. But they represent a very wide and diverse breadth of the medium, and there are a few to keep an eye on both as award contenders and exciting oddities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Probably the most likely to repeat the success of something like \u201cFlow\u201d or \u201cArco\u201d is\u00a0\u201cFallen,\u201d\u00a0a French animated feature by\u00a0Louis Clichy, a Pixar alum who worked on movies like \u201cWALL-E\u201d and \u201cUp\u201d before making two animated \u201cAsterix\u201d features in his home country. Clichy\u2019s third feature is 2D animated \u2014 with a sketchbook aesthetic (see above) that looks quite charming \u2014 and focuses on a young boy who needs an iron corset to stand upright and breaks away from his strict life on his family\u2019s farm to find a passion for music. It seems like the type of sweet, uplifting story audiences would broadly like, and if reviews are good, it can probably ride that to some awards attention.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Two films will premiere at Cannes this May before competing in the main competition of the Annecy International Film Festival in June, a path that \u201cArco\u201d and \u201cLittle Am\u00e9lie\u201d took last year. One Special Screening is\u00a0\u201cTangles,\u201d\u00a0the debut feature of Canadian director Leah Nelson, which is based on a graphic memoir by\u00a0Sarah Leavitt and focuses on a daughter who returns to her hometown to help care for her mother, who has begun suffering from Alzheimer\u2019s.\u00a0\u201cLucy Lost\u201d\u00a0from Oliver Clert is a more family-friendly story of a young orphan living in 1915 Sicily who goes on an adventure to uncover the truth behind her mysterious visions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My most anticipated animated film at Cannes is also probably the least likely to get awards buzz, although the Oscar race would likely be much more interesting if it did. Playing as a Midnight screening, \u201cJim Queen and the Quest for Chloroqueer\u201d is a retro, 2D animated independent film from debut directors Marco Nguyen and Nicolas Athan\u00e9 that sounds unabashedly camp and extremely queer, focusing on a hunky gay influencer and a twink who search for a cure to a disease that makes gay men heterosexual. It looks gorgeous, weird, daring, funny, and unlike any animated film to ever get serious awards attention, which is why I\u2019m really pulling for it to be great.<\/p>\n

Cannes isn\u2019t just the main festival itself, as there are plenty of alternate and independent sections that run in the Croisette during the same two-week period. This year, Directors\u2019 Fortnight will open with the French animated feature \u201cIn Waves\u201d from director Phuong Mai Nguyen, about the romance between a surfer and skateboarder; it\u2019s the first animated feature to open Fortnight, and will screen in both English and French language versions. The festival is also set to close with \u201cLe vertige,\u201d from French comedic director Quentin Dupieux, a movie about a man who discovers his world is a simulation that\u2019s animated to look like a PS2 game. Other films in the selection include Japanese rotoscope film \u201cWe Are Aliens\u201d and \u201cViva Carmen!\u201d, an adaptation of the famous opera by \u201cChicken for Linda!\u201d director S\u00e9bastien Laudenbach.<\/p>\n

Will all these films be good? Probably not. There\u2019s a chance that a few of them won\u2019t find distribution in the U.S. at all. Still, that\u2019s the excitement of a film festival: getting in on the ground floor of new, undiscovered movies and, when they\u2019re good, being able to say you were there to see it first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like most of the major film festivals, Cannes has had an up-and-down history with its representation of animation.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":658638,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,54192,134,1689,344,318319],"class_list":["post-658637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cannes","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-sketch-to-screen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658637\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/658638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}