The piece on MICA's Festival Image is up, along with a sidebar on three great French cartoon features of recent years. Before talking to festival organizers, I had forgotten that "Oktapodi," the hilarious nominee for best animated short in 2009, came from France's Gobelins School of the Image. The animation school that MICA's festival is highlighting, Supinfocom, seems equally strong.
Above is an image from this year's Oscar-winning cartoon short from France, "Logorama," a headlong, eyepopping satire in motion, picturing a universe overtaken by corporate trademarks and logos. In France, sophisticated shorts like "Logorama" are easier to find in festivals and on TV than they are in America, and the audience for them is growing. It's the kind of audience that here could have made a hit out of "Fantastic Mr. Fox."