After 26 years MIAF closes.

Director’s message

Douglas Adams (author of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’) famously offered that the ‘answer to everything’ is “42”. Good for him. Mine is 8/1406. Adams and I share an enthusiasm for beautiful, simple answers.
 
But as the changing times and the changing ways in which ideas are debated have arrived at MIAF’s door, an intersection of sorts has been reached. The advent of AI ensures radical and potentially hideous changes face animation – particularly commercial animation – and these winds of change have come with no roadmap, will do much damage and will clear much ground that will be re-seeded by those with little care for the kind of animation many of us love.
 
My varied crusades and [mis]adventures taught me long ago that conversations which arrive already settled in the minds of the protagonists tend to actually be either dogma or attempts at coercion. A lifelong passion – if not obsession – with politics and news (REAL news, not the garbage drip-fed on to smart phones bearing little of its genesis as work literally stolen from its original creators and readily consumed by so many, BTW) has likewise taught me that pretty much every product of contention is, in fact, not crafted from a binary take-it-or-leave-it composition but is actually made up of a myriad of disparate ingredients. Although I’ve lived a life comprised of so many mistakes and regrets that a spreadsheet would be required to manage the record, I can’t recall a single challenge that struck me as being best met by burying one’s head in the sand or pulling Canute’s old throne out of storage for a reprise moment.
 
Additionally, I reckon pretty much nothing is built out of nothing – one of the admittedly few wisdoms I’ve personally evolved is that everything has a history, and an understanding of that history always helps grapple with the contemporary gorilla that has been dropped – or invited – into the room. And it’s an odd, more-than-occasional reality that in a surprising number of cases, those least inclined to consider that history are the ones that would sometimes be most profitably afforded a view of their own complicity in building the fire they seek to deny or ignore.
 
MIAF’s DNA was never built to prosper in this environment; survive perhaps, but prosper no. And as is the case at any intersection, one of the choices is to simply turn around and go back the way one came and thus MIAF retreats and retires from the field. For 26 years MIAF at least attempted to champion auteur animation – animation made with no other agenda other than the sheer need and joy of making it. Ironically, it is this avenue of animating that will be least impacted by the arrival of AI because it is this animation that is made for no other reason than a burning – inherently human – impulse to make it. And the people who make it use the tools that make the most sense to them – there are still plenty of people in the animaverse drawing on paper, scratching onto filmstock, moving sand around and bringing puppets to life. A back-of-the-napkin calculation suggests a roster of about 7,000 films, including 800+ made in Australia filled MIAF’s 26 years. We also flew in some pretty funky guests over that period and did our level best to give lots of Australian animators a chance to talk about their work at every turn.
 
It was a wild ride and I hope you the audience got as much out of trying to take it all in as I did putting it together. Other than the filmmakers, that audience gets my biggest thanks – it would have been a lonely (and pretty weird) experience without you all. Too many people to name here deserve profound thanks for making MIAF work but MIAF’s other original co-founders Susi Allender and Nag Vladermersky cannot go unmentioned. Nor can Helen Gibbins who built the infrastructure that made MIAF a world class animation festival and Michael Hunt who for the last 10 years is – literally – the reason MIAF ran at all. Fellow traveller par-excellence Andrew Hagan deserves celebrating just (but not just) for being Andrew Hagan. Sadly there is also a group of people whose help over the years elicited less-than-no-thanks as they sought to support me while I stumbled forward prioritising MIAF above all else.
 
An early mentor – a venerable British theatre festival director – once reassured me on a particularly dark day in the midst of an earlier career that every curator commits sins of omission and commission – we leave things out we should have put in, we put things in we probably could have left out. I’ve come to understand this at an utterly visceral level. To the filmmakers I apologise for the former, to the audience I apologise for the latter. And to those who have taken issue with the way I’ve tried to marshal and communicate a view of the dangerous moment animation has arrived at I also apologise – you are right to be worried and angry; your work (as has so much of mine) is being stolen by those who care nothing for you, your work, your dreams, your careers, our artform nor our society – I honestly truly wish I had simpler answers for you than those I’ve tried to offer. Where is Douglas Adams when we really need him!!
 
To not pick a fight that you can’t win is something most can agree on I assume. Luckily, I learned that early. It took me considerably longer to figure out a more nuanced iteration was to not get involved in a fight you can’t win. But as the years pile on (and I offer this as hard won advice to anybody who could benefit from it), it’s also strikes me as a good idea to not get involved in a fight you’ve already lost. On the closing night of the last MIAF back in May, after you’d all gone home and we’d turned off the lights, it became clear to me that I and MIAF might just have arrived on that cusp. So, all things considered, this seems like a good time to turn away from that pointless abyss, gather together and record the history of MIAF, cook up a few other ways to shout about Australian animation, give some more time to my room bulging with unread books, alter the schedule to take in more sunsets and retreat to my rundown old shack by the lake where I will be waving not drowning and fishing not catching.
 
Malcolm Turner
Ex Director: Melbourne International Animation Festival