I recently sat through this in a span of a few days.

Googling for ICAF seems to return very little information so I’ll just borrow this description from where I got this collection.

This is a nice collection of Inter-College Animation Festival 2001-2006, one of the very famous Japanese annual student animation festival. It’s including 16 short films from some talented young animators. Don’t miss this wonderful animation feast.

The titles include:
Hitoshi Nishimura – The Hunter’s Forest (2003)
Shuhei Shibue – A Man Who Became Undertaker (2006)
Naohiro Takahashi – Tokyo White and Black (2006)
Takae Koyanagi – Infinity Planet (2005)
Yagi Tatsuya – Oyaji (2006)
Keiko Moritsugu – Yuubinyasan (2006)
Shigeru Okada – Red Bridge (2001)
Akiko Hirose – Dragonfly’s Dream (2006)
Yukiyo Endo – Tunawatari (2004)
Kyo Yatate – Utakata No Hibi (2004)
Akagi Saeko – Apple Colored Water (2004)
Yusuke Nakagawa – The Animated Eating Fishes (2005)
Masaki Buma – Street of Millimeter (2003)
Hirotoshi Iwasaki – Ash Time (2005)
Midori Narazaki – Boy and Girl (2005)
Keiko Kuriki – Deep Breath (2002)

It took me three days to consume ICAF (I’ll abbreviate the whole collection as this from this point on) and even more to digest it. I can’t say the whole thing was enjoyable nor can I even say it was enlightening. It was interesting.

First and foremost, ICAF is mostly an exercise of stop animation. I can only imagine that our traditional conception of anime might be a little too expensive for most aspiring college animators, but that’s merely a guess. There might be other reasons why a lot of these guys prefer stop animation. Still, it’s a fun style to behold once in a while.

Though I’m not sure if “A Man Who Became Undertaker” would count as animation.

Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. It is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in a number of ways.

Anyway, ICAF is almost completely without words beyond title screens and credits. There are some shorts that may as well be music videos.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m neither criticizing nor analyzing ICAF. I have very little art theory experience under my belt, much less animation theory. A lot of the whole thing is steeped in Japanese imagery and sounds so there’s even a cultural disconnect between me and ICAF. What most of these guys are attempting to do is usually beyond me.

You’ll find few traditonal narratives in ICAF or even none at times.

Instead, we get a lot of vignettes and a lot of abstract ideas (like what happens to a playground over the course of a year). Is this a bad thing? Well, it’d be silly to think every single one of these shorts will be entertaining. Hell, I’m so used to our mainstream culture of A to B with a dash of heroism here and there that most of ICAF leaves me emotionless. I can’t say it was fun to watch most of this collection though I did genuinely enjoy a few of them.

So why am I writing this entry? Yeah, I know I’m giving off the impression that I didn’t like ICAF, but that’s not exactly true. I didn’t enjoy it like I would a TV series, but it’s still very interesting. That sounds vague, like one of those canned responses you give to someone telling a story when you don’t really give a damn what they have to say. I mean it in this case, however.

ICAF is a different vein of animation and thus it’s interesting to behold. Amusing at times, like “Oyaji,” bafflingly confusing at others. It’s not for everyone, but it’s worth watching if you have a keen interesting in animation. The animated shorts here don’t always work for me, but it’s nice to see different ideas unbound by the common restraint money that plagues commercialized anime. For someone else who might be on the same wavelengths as these aspiring animators, maybe ICAF will be a treat to watch. I just thought it’d be worthwhile to showcase the collection since I could find so little information regarding it elsewhere on the Internet. There are some TV series with over 50 different blogs covering every little minute detail in a single episode. I’m not saying ICAF is any better than those TV series, but it deserves a little more attention.