OIAF Awards 'We Are Aliens' 'Ball Face' and More

September 23-27 saw the 50th anniversary edition of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, one of the world's top animation events. As always, after five days of animation screenings, panels, events, talks and masterclasses, the festival came to a climax with the prize ceremony. Awards were given out to filmmakers in various categories, with jury prizes as well as audience awards.

OIAF named anime feature We Are Aliens as the recipient of the Grand Prize for Feature Animation. Praying Mantis was awarded the Grand Prize for Short Animation. Ball Face, from Montreal animator Laurence Thérien became the first film in the festival's history to win four awards in a single year.

We Are Aliens is written and directed by Kohei Kadowaki, and premiered as part of Quinzaine des Cinéastes at the Cannes Film Festival. The OIAF Festival Jury praised the film for its animation, its exploration of everyday life and its sensitive portrayal of its characters.

Joe Hsieh's Praying Mantis is a powerful exploration of maternal instincts. By winning at OIAF, the film has qualified for potential nomination at the 2027 Academy Awards for Best Animated Short.

Thérien’s Ball Face is a stop-motion animation about the embarrassment and anxiety of trying to fit in. The film was awarded the Public Prize, the Hélène Tanguay Award for Humour, The Bento Box Award For Best Student Animation and the Canadian Student Award.

This year's jury was all-Canadian and featured leading voices in animation from across the country. The features jury was comprised of Luc Chamberland, Lillian Chan and Alisi Telengut, while the shorts jury included Dave Cooper, Barry Doupé and Alexandra Myotte.

The Kids' Jury was made up of Ottawa-area children between the ages of 8 and 12, who selected the winners of the Young Audiences 7+ competition. The Teen Audience 13+ award was selected by teenage festival-goers.

As is tradition, the OIAF Award Statues were created by a local artist. Ottawa-based scrap metal artist Tick Tock Tom made statues that are also working phénakisticopes featuring an animation by New York artist George Griffin.

The festival will return in 2027 from September 24-28. The complete list of winners is below.

The complete competition prize winner list

Grand Prize for Short Animation

Winner: Praying Mantis (dir. Joe Hsieh)

Jury Comment: For its ability to take us into the selfless depths of maternal instincts using sharp metaphorical imagery, fully realised internal logic, and purposeful, powerful touches of violence. 

Grand Prize for Animated Feature

Winner: We Are Aliens (dir. Kohei Kadowaki)

Jury Comment: For its skillfull capture of the incredible drama and absurdity of life. With a twisted sense of humour, where coincidences and silly entanglements gradually reveal themselves as simple but painful misunderstandings, this film is about many seemingly ordinary stories that happen to us and around us all the time, but usually go unnoticed. Different points of view, with inventive mise-en-scène, and poetic perspectives make us see familiar uneventful things in a new light. Presented as a series of everyday tableaux, these moments have a poetic musicality that suddenly bursts with dark or wonderful meaning, leaving us to imagine all the possible fates that are part of our everyday life. The animation and the sensitivity given to the characters caught in the traps of life are truly remarkable. A feast for the eyes and the senses. 

Honourable Mention: Magic Atlas (dir. Sun Xun)

Jury Comment: For its extraordinary craftsmanship, made frame by frame with woodcut animation and ink painting, this animated feature has remarkable visual richness and texture. Its unconventional narrative unfolds through layers of metaphor. It tells a political fable, and it ends with a spiritual outlook. We admire the director’s courage in using animation to criticise dictatorship and other forms of authoritarian power. 

Honourable Mention: Tangles (dir. Leah Nelson)

Jury Comment: For its exploration of an experience that, while deeply personal to some, carries a universal resonance for us all. This film is about love, loss, and the enduring connections that shape our lives. Funny, heartfelt, and ultimately heartbreaking, the film stayed with us. We were blown away by its beautiful animation, emotional depth, and cinematic execution.

Public Prize

Winner: Ball Face (dir. Laurence Thérien)

The Canada Media Fund Award for Best Canadian Animation

Winner: La comète (The Comet) (dir. Julie Charette)

Comment: For its understated, perceptive storytelling and its intelligent depiction of the sometimes painful processes of growing up.

Honourable Mention: Bisou Sauvage (dir. Bahji Jaroudi)

Comment: For its arresting animation and its wicked, incisive sense of humour about modern times.

Honourable Mention: Knowing Gaze (dir. Dylan Glynn)

Comment: For its vibrant animation style and its witty take on complex contemporary issues of identity.

Hélène Tanguay Award for Humour

Winner: Ball Face (dir. Laurence Thérien)

Comment: There were many contenders, but few films made us laugh quite as much while repeatedly smashing a child in the face with a ball. What begins as the familiar nightmare of school gym class becomes something wonderfully strange, funny and increasingly unhinged. The clay itself seems to take the beating along with its heroine—stretching, squashing and reshaping as she desperately tries to adapt, survive and somehow fit in. And knowing Hélène, she would have been gifting the cinema with her big, boisterous laugh throughout Ball Face.

Animated Short Competition - Category Prizes

Best Animated Short Award

Winner: Eri (dir. Honami Yano)

Jury Comment: For its living poetry of both images and words that depict a love that remains unmet, this film carries us through a lyrical pasture like wind through grass with thick painterly strokes.

Best Commissioned Animation

Winner: Juana Molina ‘Desinhumano’ (dir. Dante Zaballa)

Jury Comment: For its use of deceptively simple handmade forms, in a time of increasingly computer-aided animation, we found this film refreshingly joyful and tactile.

Bento Box Award for Best Student Animation

Winner: Ball Face (dir. Laurence Thérien)

Jury Comment: For its ability to take the embarrassment of youth and distil it into a mature, concise film that resonated beyond its initial comedic impression.

Canadian Student Award

Winner: Ball Face (dir. Laurence Thérien)

Comment: For capturing the absurdity and anxiety of masking, adjusting and trying to fit in, with clay animation proving the perfect medium for a story about literally reshaping yourself to belong. Its bright, candy-coloured world gives the film a playful lightness, even as it moves between comedy and something quietly heartbreaking — that familiar memory of what we were willing to do during our school years just to fit in. 

Honourable Mention: Mortal Lace (dir. Lucas Piperias)

Honourable Mention: Expo Inferno (dir. A. John Yates)

Animation for Teen Audiences 13+ Competition

Winner: Blue Flavoured (dir. Jett Ulysses)

Honourable Mention: La comète (The Comet) (dir. Julie Charette)

Animation for Young Audiences 7+ Competition

Winner: Candy Caries (dir. Tomoki Misato)

Honourable Mention: Bats and Bugs (dir. Lena von Döhren)

Platform Animation Competition

Winner: Adult Swim’s The Elephant (dirs. Pendleton Ward, Rebecca Sugar, Ian Jones-Quartey, Patrick McHale, Mike L. Mayfield, Humberto Irigoyen, Remus Buznea, and Kyriaki Kyriakou)

Comment: For the spirit of the anijam — or, more precisely, the old exquisite-corpse game — this three-part experiment brings together some of the defining voices in contemporary animation. Each team worked in isolation, with essentially no idea what the others were making, and somehow these wildly different pieces eventually had to become one film.

The result could easily have been a complete mess. Instead, it’s a bizarre, vivid and mysterious visual and narrative adventure — unpredictable from moment to moment, but never less than engaging. And frankly, it would be good to see more studios show this kind of boldness and openness to experimentation, creating work that breaks away from the increasingly tedious reliance on conventional linear storytelling.

Animated Short Competition - Craft Awards

 

Best Script

Winner: Uka-uka (dir. Henri Veermäe)

Jury Comment: For its complex arrangement of themes from the viewpoint of a child that is presented with a tender yet cruel frankness that took us off guard. This film’s sudden turn showed us resiliency in difficult situations. 

The Animation Guild Craft Award for Best Design

Winner: When the Sea was Calm (dir. Mamuka Tkeshelashvili)

Jury Comment: For its mixture of bliss and horror that was acutely felt through its impeccably realized construction, we were taken into its rich character and setting design from its first frame.

XPPen Craft Award Prize for Best Animation Technique

Winner: Daughters of the Late Colonel (dir. Elizabeth Hobbs)

Jury Comment: For its economic use of mark making to create a vast space open for the imagination to move freely in.

Best Sound Design

Winner: Paper Trail (dir. Don Hertzfeldt)

Jury Comment: For its claustrophobic symphony of tactile foley scratches, squeaks, scrapes and rubs, this film gave us pause to consider the inevitable inertia of shrinking into adulthood.

50 in 50 - Our Favourite Canadian Animated Shorts - Awards

OIAF Team Choice: The Big Snit (dir. Richard Condie)

Public Prize: Meneath: The Hidden Island of Ethics (dir. Terril Calder)