The massively popular 2024 edition of the Annecy Intl Festival of Animation came to its exciting conclusion on Saturday with the announcement of the winners of this year’s Cristal prizes. Adam Elliot‘s audience-pleasing stop-motion feature Memoir of a Snail was the winner of the 2024 Cristal for Best Animated Feature, while Alexandra Ramires and Laura Gonçalves’ s Percebese was the winner of the top prize in the shorts category.
Adam Elliot’s latest stop-motion feature Memoir of a Snail centers on a melancholic woman (voiced by Sarah Snook), who is a hoarder of snails, romance novels and guinea pigs. Elliot, who won the Oscar for his 2003 short Harvie Krumpet and also directed the acclaimed 2009 feature Mary and Max, received a lot of love from the Annecy audience this year, and is bound to find award season success later this year, as IFC Films, has already picked up the N. American distribution rights for the movie.
Among the other films receiving love from both the audience and the juries at Annecy was Gints Zilbalodis’ CG-animated feature Flow, which was the winner of the jury award, audience award, Gan Foundation Award for Distribution, and best original music for a feature film. Gints, who directed the much-praised indie movie Away, dazzled the Annecy audiences with this wordless CG-animated feature about the adventures of a cat and his animal friends in a (post-apocalytic?) world without humans. The movie, which was made for about $4.1 million, has already been picked up Sideshow and Janus Films.
Percebese, Laura Gonçalves and Alexandra Ramires’ fluidly animated short about the life cycle of a goose barnacle was the winner of the Cristal for Best Animated Short. Only two years ago, Goncalves’s previous short The Garbage Man was also nominated for a Cristal at Annecy and won the top award at Zagreb.
According to festival organizers, over 17,400 accredited attendees from 103 countries were at Annecy this year. That’s about a 10% increase from last year’s attendance of 15,820. The next edition of Annecy will take place June 8-14, 2024, and Hungary is designated as the the country of honor
Here is the complete list of the 2024 Annecy prize-winners:
Cristal for a Feature Film: Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot, Australia)
Jury Award: Flow (Gints Zilbalodis; Latvia, Belgium, France)
Audience Award: Flow (Gints Zilbalodis; Latvia, Belgium, France)
Gan Foundation Award for Distribution: Flow (Gints Zilbalodis; Latvia, Belgium, France)
Paul Grimault Award: Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window (Shnnosuke Yakuwa, Japan)
Contrechamp Features
Grand Prix: Sultana’s Dream (Islabel Herguera, Spain/Germany)
Jury Prize: Living Large (Kristina Dufková, Czech Republic, Slovakia, France)
Short Films
Cristal Prize: Percebes (Alexandra Ramires, Laura Gonçalves, Portugal, France)
Jury Prize: The Car That Came Back from the Sea Jadwiga Kowalska, Switzerland)
Audience Award: Hurikán (Jan Saska, Czech Republic, France, Slovakia, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Off-Limits Award: Glass House (Boris Labbé, France)
Alexeieff-Parker Award: Beautiful Men Nicolas Keppens, Belgium, France, Netherlands)
Jean-Luc Xiberras Award for a First Film: [S] (Mario Radev, U.K.)
TV Awards
Cristal for a TV Production: The Drifting Guitar (Sophie Roze, France, Switzerland)
Jury Award for a TV Series: My Life in Versailles “Versailles Ghost” (Clémence Madeleine-Perdrillat, Nathaniel H’limi, France, Luxembourg)
Jury Award for a TV Special: Lola et le Piano à bruits (Augusto Zanovello, France, Poland, Switzerland)
Audience Award: The Drifting Guitar (Sophie Roze, France, Switzerland)
Commissioned Films
Cristal Prize: Pictoplasma (Will Anderson, U.K.)
Jury Award for a Commissioned Film: TED-Ed ‘How Did South African Apartheid Happen, and How Did It Finally End?” (Aya Marzouk, U.S., South Africa, Egypt)
Graduation Films
Cristal: Carrotica (Daniel Sterlin-Altman, Germany)
Jury Award: Pubert Jimbob (Quirijn Dees, Belgium)
Lotte Reiniger Award: Maatitel (Govinda Sao, India)
Cristal for Best VR Work: Gargoyle Doyle (Ethan Shaftel, U.S., Austria, Argentina)
For the complete list of this year’s winners, visit annecyfestival.com/en/news
