THE annual European CARTOON Forum, held this year in Galway city, closed on Saturday night with the announcement of this year's winner of the Cartoon d'Or award for best European animated short film at a ceremony in the Town Hall Theatre.
This year's award, along with a cheque for 35,000 ecu (approximately £29,000) was presented to a German animator, Mr Tyron Montgomery, for his 12 minute film, Quest.
Almost 400 producers, animators and broadcasters from Europe attended the three day forum, an annual trade fair cum conference for the European animation industry. Delegates saw pilot episodes of series targeted at the lucrative children's television market, and meetings took place throughout the day between potential buyers and eager sellers.
Television is the mainstay of animation globally, and CARTOON aims to strengthen European producers against the powerful American industry. While Irish animation has declined since its heyday in the 1980s, when the American animator Don Bluth employed more than 350 people in feature film production at his Dublin studio several Irish companies were represented, some working in transnational partnership with European animators.
There are now about 150 people working in full time studio employment in Ireland, according to Mr Eamonn Lawless of the Dublin based Fred Wolf Studios.
At a press conference on Thursday, the chief executive of the Irish Film Board, Mr Rod Stoneman, announced the extension into 1997 of Frameworks, a funding scheme for "creative short animations" jointly supported by the IFB, RTE and the Northern Ireland Film Council. Animation is eligible for Section 35 tax relief, and productions may apply for development loans from the IFB, but production finance is not available for animated feature films.
Financial support from the EU is "especially important for smaller countries and minority languages", said Mr Jacques Delmoly, Head of the EU's MEDIA Programme, which funds CARTOON.
CARTOON provides "soft loans" for company expansion script development and training to European animators, and organises the annual Forum, which usually takes place in the EU's peripheral regions.
