‘Toons in the ‘Zoo’ due three days in May

Animation as entertainment, education, employment and art will be in the spotlight when the third Kalamazoo Animation Festival International (KAFI) is staged the weekend of May 13-15 in downtown Kalamazoo.

As with the events in May 2002 and 2003, professional animators, artists, students, and fans will gather in Southwest Michigan to hone their creative skills and turn downtown Kalamazoo into “Toon Town” for three days.

In the 2003 edition of KAFI, more than 330 student and professional animators from nine nations — India, France, Germany, Bulgaria, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, China, and throughout the United States — entered juried competition and vied for $15,000 in prize money. Professional-development seminars at which practitioners and students interacted, screenings of the entries, and showings of both contemporary and classic cartoons attracted audiences of more than 3,500 people.

Some $15,000 in prize money will again be part of the 2005 KAFI that is basically a film festival for both adults and children. KAFI’s showcase event, the unique “Cartoon Challenge,” will again have teams of animation students from colleges around the nation taking part in a week-long competition. Those testing their “under-the-gun” animation talents in the “Cartoon Challenge” will come to Kalamazoo the week prior to the festival to create a 30-second, public-service announcement for television.

The 10 teams will not know the topic until the week-long competition begins. A panel of five professional animators/judges selected a team from San Jose State University the winner of a scholarship as 2003 Cartoon Challenge champion. The California entry traveled almost as far for the competition as the team representing an animation school in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Also returning from the 2003 edition will be a one-day educators conference. This year’s topic will be “Discovering the Next Generation.” More than 70 educators took part last year, learning more about animation education and how they will be developing the next generation of animators.

The festival, regarded as the first of its kind in the Midwest, is again being organized by Kalamazoo Valley Community College and its Center for New Media with the assistance of Downtown Kalamazoo Inc., the Kalamazoo Valley Museum, and the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo. For the third straight year, Kalamazoo’s Irving S. Gilmore Foundation is one of the prime sponsors of the salute to the art of animated films.

A grant from the Kalamazoo Community Foundation will support animation workshops at the grassroots level for Kalamazoo middle-school students, while the Arcus Foundation approved a $10,000 grant for the 2005 edition of the “Cartoon Challenge.”

KAFI is gaining a reputation as an animation festival. Two of its entries have been nominated for Academy Awards the last two years.

KAFI is now a biennial event sharing the every-other-year format with the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival that brings world-famous performers to downtown Kalamazoo for two weeks in May of even-numbered years. The lion’s share of the activities and events will be clustered at the college’s Arcadia Commons Campus, including the museum and The Center for New Media.

Nuts-and-bolts information about the KAFI events and activities, the “Cartoon Challenge,” prizes and awards, and other details are available at this web page: http:// kafi.kvcc.edu. The festival’s office number is 373-7883. David Baker, the festival’s director, can be contacted at (269) 373-7923 or dbbaker@kvcc.edu. CS