2026 Ottawa International Animation Festival Review Roundup: Part 1

This year marks 50 years of Ottawa International Animation Festival, and Josh was on the ground covering some of the best that the animation industry has to offer. In Part 1, he reviews 3 of his favourites from the fest.

Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe!, dir. Andrea Szelesová

Andrea Szelesová’s Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe! is a beautifully crafted animated short that turns an unusual fantasy premise into a touching story about loneliness, difference and acceptance. The film follows Yios, a young mythical boy whose head shines like the sun. What initially appears to be a playful fantasy quickly becomes a thoughtful exploration of what it means to feel excluded because of something that makes you different.

The film opens high above Earth, in a fantastical playground where the children of Greek gods and mythical creatures gather to play. Yios immediately stands out because his glowing solar head, inherited from his father Helios, is both extraordinary and troublesome. Unlike his father's controlled and beautiful light, his rays burst out unpredictably, causing accidents and frightening the other children. His desire to participate is obvious, but his inability to control his energy gradually pushes him to the edge of the group. Emotions are communicated through movement, facial expressions, colour, composition and sound. His isolation is often visible simply through where he is positioned in relation to the other children. When everyone else plays together, Yios frequently appears separated from the group, making his loneliness something the audience can see rather than simply being told about.

The animation also gives the film a distinctive artistic identity. Inspired by ancient mythology and Minoan frescoes, the world combines the flat, decorative qualities of ancient art with fluid contemporary 2D animation, reminiscent of the colourful, anything-goes elasticity of classic Adventure Time. The mythical characters and cloud-filled environments create the feeling of a moving storybook or ancient vase painting, and at the center of these compositions is Yios's brilliant orange-yellow glow, which contrasts strongly with the surrounding blues and darker tones. His light functions both as a literal source of illumination and as a visual representation of his individuality.

The turning point arrives when the other children play a cruel prank that sends him falling from the clouds to Earth. What could have been simply a punishment becomes the beginning of a transformation. On Earth, he encounters a blind human boy who responds to him without judging his appearance. Instead of being frightened by the brightness, the boy experiences it differently. This encounter provides the film's most powerful metaphor. Yios has spent the entire story believing that his uncontrollable light is the reason he cannot belong, yet the human boy's acceptance allows that same light to become something beautiful. When the boys interact, the explosive energy that once caused problems begins producing intricate, beautiful patterns.

Viera Marinová's music and sound design are equally important. Without spoken dialogue, sound becomes essential to the storytelling, helping distinguish moments of excitement, danger, loneliness and calm. The soundtrack complements the animation rather than overpowering it, allowing the visuals to remain the primary means of communication. Ultimately, Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe! succeeds because its message never feels forced. Szelesová presents acceptance through action rather than speeches, allowing the audience to discover the meaning alongside Yios. Beneath its colourful mythology and playful imagery is a sincere story about the pain of being rejected and the importance of finding someone willing to see beyond the surface.

Review by: Joshua Hunt

Paper Trail, dir. Don Hertzfeldt

Don Hertzfeldt’s Paper Trail is a deceptively simple animated short about the passage of time, the fragility of memory, and the traces people leave behind. At only fourteen minutes, it compresses an entire human life into a rapidly accumulating collection of drawings, notes, sketches, and scraps of paper and the result is quintessential Hertzfeldt: formally inventive, darkly funny, deeply melancholic, and far more emotionally ambitious than its modest visual style initially suggests. Few animated shorts manage to say so much about being alive with so little.

The film follows Steven Richardson through the evidence of his existence rather than through conventional character animation. We encounter him as a child, a young man, an adult, and eventually an old man, but Hertzfeldt doesn’t need to show him in a traditional cinematic sense. Instead, his life emerges through what he draws and writes, beginning with childhood doodles that give way to increasingly recognizable figures, relationships, routines, disappointments, and memories. The papers accumulate almost as quickly as life itself. One moment we are looking at a child’s drawing and moments later, decades seem to have passed.

That accelerated sense of time is one of the film’s greatest achievements. Paper Trail refuses the comfortable rhythm of a conventional biographical narrative. There are no long stretches devoted to individual events and no attempt to make every moment of Steven’s life equally important. Instead, Hertzfeldt jumps across years and sometimes decades, allowing the viewer to experience life as a collection of fragments. The effect is strangely familiar. Human beings experience their own lives day by day, but memory often works differently. Years disappear into impressions, images, objects, and isolated moments, and Paper Trail captures that sensation with remarkable precision.

The paper itself becomes the film’s central metaphor. Every mark suggests that someone was there. A drawing, a handwritten note, an unfinished sketch, or an erased line becomes evidence of a life that once existed. Hertzfeldt makes no attempt to disguise the physical process of animation. The imperfections of the drawings, the movement of the pages, and the visible marks on the paper are not technical limitations but essential parts of the film’s language. The medium becomes the message: a life is made up of marks that accumulate, overlap, fade, and eventually stop.

This approach places Paper Trail firmly within Hertzfeldt’s distinctive body of work. His breakthrough short Rejected established a visual style built around crude stick figures, hand-drawn animation, absurd comedy, and a willingness to expose the artificiality of the medium. Beneath its deliberately ridiculous surface, however, Rejected already demonstrated Hertzfeldt’s interest in creation and destruction. Paper Trail takes that same stripped-down aesthetic and applies it to something much more intimate. The drawings are still simple, but now they represent an entire existence.

The connection to It’s Such a Beautiful Day is even more direct. That film transformed the seemingly insignificant life of its stick-figure protagonist, Bill, into an exploration of mortality, loneliness, memory, illness, and the search for meaning. Paper Trail revisits many of those concerns while changing the structure completely, but rather than concentrating on one character’s experience, it allows an entire life to emerge from fragments. Both films demonstrate Hertzfeldt’s remarkable ability to find the profound within the mundane.

The World of Tomorrow trilogy provides another important point of comparison. Those films look toward the future and explore memory, identity, mortality, and the possibility of preserving human consciousness. Paper Trail looks in the opposite direction. Instead of asking what humanity might become, it asks what remains after a person has lived. In both cases, Hertzfeldt is interested in the tension between the enormous complexity of human consciousness and the physical fragility of the individual.

What makes Paper Trail particularly effective is its balance of comedy and sadness. Hertzfeldt never treats mortality with solemnity alone. There is an absurdity to the ordinary routines of life, and the film understands that comedy can make its darker ideas more powerful rather than less serious. The laughter gradually becomes uncomfortable because viewers begin to recognize their own experience in Steven’s increasingly fragile trail of memories.

Ultimately, Paper Trail is a remarkable achievement because it makes the most basic element of animation, a line on a page, feel existentially significant. Hertzfeldt has spent his career demonstrating that animation does not require elaborate worlds, detailed characters, or technological spectacle to explore enormous ideas. Here, he strips the medium down even further and few marks become a face, a face becomes a person, a person becomes a life, and a life becomes a pile of paper.

That final transformation is what makes Paper Trail so affecting. The film is not really about drawings, it is about the desperate human desire to leave some evidence behind, to prove that we were here. In its small scale, formal ingenuity, and emotional depth, Paper Trail feels like a culmination of Hertzfeldt’s career: a film about time made by an artist who has spent decades finding infinity inside a single line.

Review by: Joshua Hunt

The End, dir. Niki Lindroth von Bahr

Niki Lindroth von Bahr has always been interested in the moment when an ordinary place begins to feel wrong. Her new film, The End, moves that fascination somewhere appropriately impersonal: an international airport, a place built around the idea that millions of people can pass through without ever really being there. At first, it looks almost reassuring. The airport is immaculate, with its miniature architecture precise and brightly lit, all polished surfaces, signs, counters and carefully arranged commercial spaces. Von Bahr’s stop-motion has always possessed this peculiar quality of making its worlds look both completely artificial and strangely more convincing than reality. Her sets are small enough to fit on a table, but the camera treats them with the seriousness of a live-action location. You find yourself looking at the details before you remember that none of it exists at full scale…then you start noticing the animals.

A pig works in the airport, a dolphin serves smoothies, a slug is trying to sell something in the duty-free shop (a hand-carved flute? Or perhaps a casket to take home to your kids?). These are ridiculous creatures in recognizably mundane jobs, but von Bahr doesn’t play their absurdity for easy laughs, these characters behave with the weary professionalism of people who have done the same thing for years. They stand behind counters, answer questions, watch television, try to get through their shifts, while somewhere above them, an airplane is in trouble.

The premise is almost aggressively simple: catastrophe is approaching, while the people who might be able to do something about it remain absorbed in their own little routines. The airport becomes a miniature version of a civilization that has become very good at organizing everything except the things that actually matter. Here, the airport is a particularly effective setting because it is almost entirely composed of systems: security, retail, transportation, communication, schedules. Everything is supposed to work, but the comedy here comes from the fact that nobody seems particularly interested in whether it does.

The film’s visual style makes this contradiction even sharper. Von Bahr shoots her miniature environments with a remarkable restraint, there is none of the frantic movement often associated with animation. Instead, the camera observes as characters pause, look around. These animals move in tiny increments through an environment that has been painstakingly constructed to resemble the real world, and yet the emotional paralysis feels completely human. That is what makes the film’s anthropomorphic animals so effective. Von Bahr has spoken about using animals as a kind of filter over stories that are otherwise dark and unpleasant, allowing the characters to become stand-ins for people without tying them to one particular kind of person.

The film also has a strangely theatrical quality, with the airport feeling less like a functioning building than a stage set waiting for something to happen. The brightly coloured advertisements and immaculate surfaces create an almost cheerful artificiality, while the impending disaster hangs over everything. This shift from the colourful everyday world into something increasingly ominous is crucial to the film’s effect. Von Bahr is not interested in giving us a heroic response to catastrophe, but instead, people continuing to be themselves. The television remains on, someone continues selling something, someone else is trying to get a drink. The end, when it comes, has therefore been sitting in the film from the beginning.

That is the bleak joke of the title. The End isn’t only about death or destruction. It is about the strange human ability to carry on with the smallest possible concerns while something enormous approaches. Von Bahr’s miniature world makes that idea literal, as everything is tiny, carefully controlled, held together by a filmmaker moving objects a fraction of an inch at a time. Still, inevitably, everything comes apart. The film’s darkness isn’t expressed through ugliness, it is expressed through immaculate surfaces, deadpan performances, absurdly detailed sets and characters who look as though they belong in a children’s television program. The closer the world gets to falling apart, the more carefully it has been constructed. The joke is that it looks so real, the horror is that it doesn’t need to.

Review by: Joshua Hunt