Amid tough competition, 24-year-old Benjamin Renner of France received the pan-European Cartoon d'Or Award on Friday night for A Mouse's Tale, a surprising fable-like short film.
With the top award for best animated short film came a 15,000-euro prize. Part of the annual Cartoon Forum event, held in Ludwisgsburg, Germany, Cartoon D'Or is the only European prize specifically for animated short films.
Originally titled La queue de la souris, the four-minute winning film combines drawings and cut-out animation. It was Renner's graduation project at La Poudrière, école du film d'animation.
"I wanted to tell a short, simple story, a tale about a lion and a mouse, an encounter between a tiny harmless creature and an enormous one," said Renner, 24. "It was important in the film that the setting helped to transform the viewers into a little mouse, to throw them into a dark and strange forest, a large black mass, a world where appearances are deceiving, where by simply adding an eye to a mountain it becomes an terrifying lion."
"By using silhouette animation, I had a large degree of freedom for the setting. I was not constrained by technical difficulties and was able to concentrate on the story," Renner continued.
"Finally, what was most important for me was to be able to tell a fable like the ones I heard as a child and which have stayed in my mind without me really knowing why."
Renner is now working at Les Armateurs as lead animator on the feature adaptation of Ernest et Célestine.
After his A-levels, Benjamin Renner followed a foundation course for art schools before joining the Fine Arts School of Angoulême, where he got his National Diploma in Graphic Novel. During the two years that he spent at La Poudrière, an animation film-directing school in France, he directed Le corbeau voulant imiter l'aigle (one-minute film) and Le plus gros président du monde (a commissioned film for Canal J Television channel), as well as A Mouse's Tale.
The four other nominated films were Breakout (Arnaud Demuynck, Belgium), John and Karen (Matthew Walker, United Kingdom), The Bridge (Vincent Bierrewaerts, Belgium/France) and The White Wolf (Pierre-Luc Granjon, France).
Those at Cartoon d'Or voted for France 3 as Broadcaster of the Year, Rubber Duck Entertainment as Investor/Distributor of the Year, and Cartoon Saloon (Ireland) as Producer of the Year.
