London International Animation Festival Starts Today

London International Animation Festival 2021 will run from 26 November – 5 December. It will be available to see in cinemas in London and online on Eventive.

Some programs are available online worldwide, while some are restricted to the UK (restrictions, when there are any, are stated on the Eventive page of each program, and all the programs that will be available worldwide are listed here). Both rentals of individual programs and passes to the whole online festival are available.

As has become usual for the festival, its programs of new work include several new independent animated shorts from Japan:

• Yoriko Mizushiri's Anxious Body (Fuan na tai, trailer) in International Competition Programme 3 – Playing with Emotion (UK only)
• Honami Yano's A Bite of Bone (Honekami, trailer) in International Competition Programme 4 – Being Human (UK only)
• Zhou Xiaolin's Half of an Apple (Jūnigatsu) and Momoka Kato's Flying Squirrels and the Pyrotechnician (Momonga to hanabishi, clip) in Best of the Next 1 (worldwide)
• Zhang Lihong's Follow (Forō) and Isaku Kaneko's The Balloon Catcher in Best of the Next 2 (worldwide)
• Ryoji Yamada's video for millenium parade's "Trepanation" in the Music Video Session (worldwide)
• Kannosuke Enomoto's Parasite and Me (Kiseichū to watashi) in Late Night Bizarre (worldwide).

There will also be a Best of the Fest program (available worldwide), at which the winners of Best Film of the Festival, Best British Film, Best Sound, Best Children’s Film, Best Abstract Film and Best Late Night Bizarre Film will be announced and shown again in full.

In addition, as part of the British Film Institute's Japan 2021 season and in partnership with the Japan Foundation, London, this year's festival includes the London premiere of the feature version of Takahide Hori's puppet animation JUNK HEAD (following its UK premiere at Leeds International Film Festival on November 12; not available online), retrospective programs of the shorts of Atsushi Wada and other independent Japanese animation of the last decade, and an online talk with Wada and Sarina Nihei (Rabbit's Blood, Polka-Dot Boy), which is free to attend but requires registration on Eventbrite in advance (all available worldwide).