Two Sundays ago the annual London International Animation Festival held its Best of the Fest re-cap for all those too busy (lazy) to view all of the short animated films on offer this year. For the uninitiated the cult festival spans the Curzon Soho, the Renoir, the Horse Hospital and the Rio Cinema over one week, showing work from award winners, industry veterans and newcomers alike. I say 'cult' - there was a full crowd at the Curzon for the first showing at 7pm and maybe eighty people for the second at 9pm. Here’s my best of the ‘Best Of’.

First up was a hilarious piece called Global Warming by S Lieberman and I Coric, which consisted of a green blob playing an acoustic guitar singing in garbled English about how he didn’t really believe in it, and how even if it was true, the only way he would be affected by it would be if he was re-incarnated as a butterfly to flit around his great-great-great grandchildren.

The next was The Tiny Fish by Gregory Malishev, which was an uber-cute winter story of a little girl’s battle to save a fish from an evil, bearded fisherman. What was great about this one was its emphasis on CUTE and texture, the girl’s woolly hat matching the warm feel of her cat... also the remarkable sound-effects and soundtrack used to convey tensions and emotions.

Perhaps the most visually arresting winner was Pecatum Parvum by Asya Lukin. An astoundingly-detailed claymation short about an old man’s wander around his Eastern-bloc city, it touchingly depicted daily goings on – such as two tramps drinking vodka and playing guitar, a market scene and a furtive moment between two elderly people on a street bench. Inspired by the life of Daniil Kharms (a political subversive in the time of the Russian Tsar), the piece stumbles from the foolish, funny monologue of a man playing with his thoughts, to darkly tinged musings on the ultimate mysteries of life. An excellent subject and topic poignantly covered, Lukin portrays both Kharms and Tsarist Russia as equally romantic and bleak.

The knowing The Irresistible Smile by Ami Lindholm is a simple short detailing the many unenviable tasks an airline stewardess has to deal with on every flight, juggling the needs of about a million different people at the same time. As gently mocking as it is amusingly accurate, the real wit lies in Lindholm cleverly managing to reverse the roles in a smug crescendo of a finale.

A personal favourite was an excellent piece called I Met The Walrus, by Josh Raskin that revolves around an interview with John Lennon by a 14-year-old kid called Jerry Levitan. Jerry snuck into Lennon’s hotel room (it was 1969 when John and Yoko were doing that whole bed-in for peace thing) and persuaded him to give a 40 minute interview. It’s a really great interview already, and what Josh Raskin has done is to set Lennon’s words, recorded by the 14-year-old Levitan, to a fountain of animation. This energising of Lennon’s sound bites really emphasises how intelligent the guy was, and how well he understood the natures of politics and man. A subtle, but resounding tribute to a great spokesman.

Alongside I Met The Walrus as my official best of ‘The Best’ - Skhizein, by Jeremy Clapin. It tells of a man called Henry that is hit by an asteroid and wakes up to find that he can move things without touching them – he’s not dead, we discover, but exactly 91cm away from himself. Cue Henry’s wonderfully hilarious and tender exploits adapting himself to his new condition. I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say that Clapin is a clever chap indeed who may or may not have dealt with some serious issues as a child. This one I have no hesitancy in calling groundbreaking.

For an EXCLUSIVE look at the trailer, click here.

I managed to catch up with Nag Vlad, the head of the LIAF for some questions afterwards.

The audience figures this year were much, much higher than previous years. How do you account for this increase in awareness about the animation industry?

I don’t know if there is more awareness about the animation industry. I can only really talk about our festival. We now have almost 3,000 dedicated subscribers to our email newsletters and we are beginning to see some of the same faces coming back to our festival each year. It feels like our audience are beginning to trust us enough to know we are programming animation that both entertains and challenges – hence we feel able to curate more ‘specialised’ animation sessions within the festival such as themed programmes, historical programmes, focus/retrospectives on specific countries and animators etc. This is mixed with our competitive sessions where we screen the best of the most recent short films from around the world – in all LIAF is a well-rounded festival with something for everyone. We have noticed more people attending the presentations/Q and A’s by our guest animators too – I guess that people are more hungry to learn about how and why the filmmakers practice their craft but I think that is a general trend within the industry.

Where is the UK with respect to European countries in terms of creative output?

Despite the funding climate in the UK being so poor at present (virtually the only funding schemes left dedicated solely to animation are Animate and Mesh), we still produce an inordinate amount of very high quality work. Many British films win awards at the top festivals both here and abroad – there are a number of established animators who continue to produce high quality work (such as Phil Mulloy, Paul Bush, Ruth Lingford, Chris Shepherd, Jonathan Hodgson to name a few) alongside many new, very talented filmmakers who come through the film schools. There are also many animators who are self-taught and now that the software is relatively affordable more people are making films without having attended animation schools. On the one hand this has produced a glut of rather ropey films but the odd few shine through.

As well as filmmakers who work more or less in isolation on their films, there are also many amazing production houses (Slinky, Trunk, Tandem, Passion Pics, Studio etc) who produce incredible commercial work (TV commercials, title sequences, music videos etc). The big budgets from this work then allows them to spend more time on their more personal short films. I would put the UK in the top five countries who have the highest creative output – the others being Canada, France, Russia and Germany. But most countries have some sort of animation industry. It is very much a growth industry – LIAF screened films from 28 different countries this year.

The Festival this year saw animation dealing with a wide range of issues such as dictatorship, mental instability and censorship - is this a modern slant or has animation always dealt with these subjects?

The nature of the artform means that it can comment on a lot of serious issues and get away with it – because a lot of people still think of animation as just ‘cartoons for kids’. Our main aim is to dispel that myth by screening films that deal with all of the concepts you mentioned and a whole lot more. The unique properties of animation make it a powerful tool in the hands of a documentary maker. It can recreate what the camera missed. It can convey things that no camera can capture. It can soften a harsh message and it can bring layers of emotion and meaning to documentary that a camera would struggle to capture. But this is nothing new – there are a whole bunch of political propaganda films made during the 1930’s and 1940’s (there’s a programme in this that we are putting together, hopefully for LIAF 2009). Also, many famous characters – Felix the Cat, Betty Boop and many Tex Avery creations produced in the 40’s to 50’s have subversive elements to them.