Age Range: 12

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First Position

One of the most talked about films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, First Position follows six astoundingly gifted, unbelievably disciplined young dancers vying for a spot in the Youth America Grand Prix. Considered one of the most prestigious ballet competitions in the world, the NYC showcase provides students the opportunity to dance for scholarships to the world’s top dance schools and land contracts with renowned companies. Joan Sebastian, 16, from Cali, Colombia dances to create a better life for himself and his family. Miko, 12, from Palo Alto, pursues her love of ballet with the help of (or perhaps in spite of) her perfectionist Tiger Mom. Michaela, 14, was adopted as a toddler from war-torn Sierra Leone and fights through injury to overcome stereotypes that keep many black dancers out of the spotlight. And then there’s Gaya from Israel, who at only 11 years old dances with a poise, control and maturity that is simply astonishing to behold. With tensions building as we progress to the make-or-break finals, the film supplies all the drama you would expect — but even more than a dance movie, First Position captures the universal trials and triumphs of childhood across all walks of life.
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Yellow Submarine

An icon of psychedelic pop culture, Yellow Submarine is a colorful musical spectacle and an exhilaratingly joyful cinematic experience for all ages — filled with visual invention, optical illusions, word play, and glorious, glorious music. Once upon a time…or maybe twice…there was an unearthly paradise called Pepperland, 80,000 leagues under the sea it lay, a place where beauty, happiness, and music reigned supreme. But this peaceful harmony is shattered when the Blue Meanies invade with their army of storm bloopers, apple bonkers, snapping turtle turks, and the menacing flying glove in an attempt to stop the music and drain Pepperland of all color and hope. Now it’s The Beatles to the rescue, as our animated heroes team up with Young Fred and the Nowhere Man and journey across seven seas to free Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, make peace with the Meanies, and restore music, color, and love to the world. But beyond all the music and whimsy, Yellow Submarine is a landmark in animation, with Heinz Edelmann’s inspired art direction conjuring up a non-stop parade of wildly different styles and techniques. From the paper-doll residents of Pepperland, to the tinted photography of the soot covered roofs and smokestacks of Liverpool, the menagerie of fanciful characters in the Sea of Monsters, the kaleidoscopic color-splashed rotoscoping of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the vertigo inducing op-art of the Sea of Holes, and the triumphant euphony of the It’s All Too Much finale, the film is simply a joy.
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Ninja Kids!!!

From the twisted mind of Takashi Miike (whose The Great Yokai War will make a great NYICFF “Midnight Madness” screening if we ever get around to it) comes an insane new kids’ flick about a feuding ninja school — a riotous action-packed kung-fu comedy that easily earns all three exclamation points in its title. Little Rantaro comes from a long line of low-ranking ninjas, so when the time comes to leave the family farm to enter ninja school himself he is determined to study hard. Yet despite their dedication in star-throwing, explosives, and rock-climbing, Rantaro’s first year class is so inept that the headmaster declares an early summer vacation and sends them all home. But the youngsters will get to earn their stars yet — after being challenged by a rival clan, the first-years must race to ring the bell at a mountaintop temple to save the school. Brilliant in its excess and bursting with joyous energy from the infectious young cast, the film is loaded with non-stop visual gags, dopey villains, adorable ninja trainees, and one very informative “friendly ninja trivia commentator” (as well as a musical back-story about a ninja-turned-hairdresser, sung mock operatic under a shower of falling flower petals). To quote one reviewer: Your jaw will drop like an elevator with a snapped cable. Be sure to stay for the end credits!
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Echoes of the Rainbow

Winner of the Crystal Bear (youth audience award) at the Berlin Film Festival and Hong Kong’s official entry for this year’s Oscars®, Echoes of the Rainbow is a graceful and emotionally powerful tale based on the filmmaker’s real-life childhood. It’s the spring of 1969 and the world will have to wait another six months before Neil Armstrong sets foot on the moon — but our young hero “Big Ears” is running through the streets of Hong Kong with a goldfish bowl on his head, Big brother Desmond (played wonderfully by Cantopop heartthrob, Aarif Lee) is a gold-medal track star and ace student who plays guitar and nurtures a nascent romance with soft-spoken cutie pie Flora. Meanwhile, their parents work their fingers to the bone running a tiny neighborhood shoe store. Their dream is simple: all they want is for their children to have a better life than they did — and this mood of nostalgic optimism and yearning is reflected perfectly by the sappy 60’s pop ballads wafting from big brother’s transistor radio. But the sunny tone soon darkens as the family is beset by a slumping economy, social unrest, and the onset of Hong Kong’s annual typhoons — presaging an even more wrenching family tragedy. This wonderful, bittersweet saga is almost epic in scale, evoking good times and bad times, love and loss, with sincerity, humor, and tenderness.
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Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below

Makoto Shinkai is perhaps the world’s finest animator and his brilliant new feature delivers frame after frame of jaw-dropping photorealistic splendor: skyscapes of unspeakable majesty, a butterfly on a twig, a blade of grass — all are rendered with such astounding delicacy and precision that you mourn their passing once the image has left the screen. The story is a modern-day Orpheus tale with a sci-fi twist that pays tribute to the great works of Hayao Miyazaki — especially Princess Mononoke — with its demonic spirit-gods and magnificent forest creatures. Asuna spends her afternoons alone in the mountains, using her crystal radio to listen to haunting songs from somewhere far away. One afternoon, a wild bear-like creature attacks and Asuna is saved by Shun, a boy with strange powers who comes from a mythical underworld beneath the Earth that is a gateway to the afterlife. When Asuna returns the next day to find him gone, she decides to leave the world of the living behind and follow him.
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How to Lose Weight in 60 Seconds

From fad diets to stomach staples, a whirlwind minute road test of 12 approaches to weight loss. Do not try this at home.
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Let’s Make Out

From the creator of last year’s Chicken Cowboy, a musical tribute to the innocent joys of smooching and booty-shaking.
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Marcel the Shell with the Shoes On

An up-close and personal interview with internet video star Marcel, a tiny shell with one eyeball, two shoes, and a really great personality!
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Backwards

A love story so backwards, it has to be told in reverse.
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Book Girl and Cabinet Girl

A sweet and tender story of friendship, jealousy, and love. Book Girl and Cabinet Girl meet and become friends. But then Scissors Boy comes along and cuts them apart.
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Bottle

This transoceanic love story, animated in stop motion on the beach, forest, and undersea, details a long distance friendship that blossoms between a sandman and a snowwoman who exchange gifts via a bottle in the water. But sand and snow cannot withstand water, so how can the two hope to be together?
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Savage

A woman sings a haunting Cree lullaby as we see a young girl preparing to attend a new school. But as we enter the classroom the film morphs into a Thriller-style zombie musical — in this moving short about the plight of Native American children separated from their parents and sent to residential schools to “take the Indian” out of them.
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The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Hamburger

The latest film from NYICFF’s favorite hometown hero, Bill Plympton is a factory farming fable about the power of advertising, the meaning of life, and ultimately the test of a mother’s love.
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(Notes On) Biology

Probably the most exciting lesson on etoecology you’ll ever receive combines rotoscoping and stop-motion animation to literally illustrate what really goes on during biology class (parents, look away).
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Benigni

A lonesome xylophone player discovers a fleshy lump growing under his arm. But when he attempts to remove it, the tumor displays some unconventional qualities.
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A Cat in Paris

NYICFF is thrilled to present the US Premiere of the brilliant new feature from Folimage, the animation studio behind Mia & the Migoo and Raining Cats and Frogs. A Cat in Paris is a beautifully hand-drawn caper set in the shadow-drenched alleyways of Paris. Dino is a pet cat that leads a double life. By day he lives with Zoe, a little mute girl whose mother, Jeanne, is a detective in the Parisian police force. But at night he sneaks out the window to work with Nico — a slinky cat-burglar with a big heart, whose fluid movements are poetry in motion — as he evades captors and slips and swishes from rooftop to rooftop across the Paris skyline. The cat’s two worlds collide when young Zoe decides to follow Dino on his nocturnal adventures — and falls into the hands of Victor Costa, a blustery gangster planning the theft of a rare statue. Now cat and cat burglar must team up to save Zoe from the bumbling thieves, leading to a thrilling acrobatic finale on top of Notre Dame. A Cat in Paris is a warm and richly humorous love letter to classic noir films and the stylized wit of the Pink Panther cartoons — and Dino, the literal cat burglar, manages to steal the show with little more than a subtle swish of the tail and quiet mew.
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Toys in the Attic

The NYICFF 2010 Grand Prize winner is back, in a new English language version, featuring the voices of Forest Whitaker, Joan Cusack and Cary Elwes. Legendary Czech stop-motion animation master Jiri Barta’s first feature in over 20 years is a diabolically inventive tale, four parts Toy Story and one part David Lynch, as a group of abandoned toys stage an ambitious rescue of their kidnapped friend. Set behind the doors of a dusty attic, the adorable doll Buttercup plays mom to a motley family of castaways: the station master Teddy Bear, clay-animated Schubert, and the Quixotic marionette knight Sir Handsome. In this enchanted world every day is a birthday, until a mysterious black cat kidnaps the beloved Buttercup and takes her to the Land of Evil ruled by the villainous Head of State, a maniacal Cold War military bust who commands an army of mechanical, mustachioed cockroaches and an all-seeing spying eye. Both a spooky children’s fairy tale and Soviet-era allegory, Toys in the Attic marks a career highpoint for Barta, who was among the first to raise stop-motion animation to an art form, paving the way for modern hits like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline, and Fantastic Mr. Fox.
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The Storytelling Show

Don’t miss the hilarious new comedy from the producers of Kirikou and the Sorceress, The Triplets of Belleville and The Secret of Kells. Laurent is so good at telling bedtime stories that his kids decide to enter him in a reality-show TV contest, where the competing dads are given cues and have to invent a bedtime story on the spot. Who will tell the best story? Will it be the music loving dad? The know-it-all professor? The dad with severe anger management issues? Or will it be Eric, Laurent’s manipulative. lying, cheating co-worker, who will stop at nothing to see Laurent fail? The deceptively simple animation clears space for rapid fire joking and visual humor — as the scene shifts back and forth between the studio sound stage and the fathers’ imagined stories, where princesses ride dolphins and prehistoric cavemen sing operettas — riffing on everything from Harry Potter to Mick Jagger along the way. Inspired by the director’s own childhood memories, The Storytelling Show is a raucous tribute to the joys of imagination and the limitless possibilities of a good story.
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Magic Piano 3D

NYICFF is proud to present the US Premiere of Magic Piano, the virtuosic stop-motion masterpiece from the Academy Award®-winning producer of Peter and the Wolf, set to Chopin’s etudes in celebration of the 200th anniversary of his birth. Magic Piano will be screened in 3D with live concert piano accompaniment by Derek Wang. The film, part of the Flying Machine series, is a soaring tale of a girl who takes off into the open skies and travels the globe on a flying piano in search of her father. Other musical animation in the program includes Metro and award-winning films Luminaris and The Maker. Little Postman, pl.ink!, and Night Island — also from the Flying Machine series — will be accompanied by Anna Larsen. Derek Wang and Anna Larsen are Young Scholars from the Lang Lang International Music Foundation.
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Salaam Dunk

One part More than a Game, two parts Bad News Bears, this thoroughly charming and eye-opening sports doc offers a glimpse of hope and possibility for life in Iraq through the vantage point of a girls college basketball team. In its second year of existence, the American University of Iraq women’s team has never won a single game – not surprising in a culture where team sports are strictly for men and when most of the players have never touched a basketball (some even show up to tryouts in high heels!). Yet what they lack in talent they make up for in spunk, executing every drill and taking every direction from Connecticut English teacher-turned coach Ryan, whose earnestness sometimes plays like parody as he rallies his motley but endearing group into game shape. Through interviews and homemade video diaries, team members share their experiences before leaving war-torn homes and finding refuge at the university, where Kurds, Sunnis, Christians and Shiites are all welcome. Though the basketball is laughable (they lose one game 68 to 2), filmmaker David Fine captures every pass and nail-biting free throw as if he was filming for ESPN, and provides an overcoming-the-odds spirit so strong that the viewer can’t help but cheer for the rag-tag team. But the true heroes are the girls off court. Though a world apart from the lives led by most New York girls, what comes through in the film are not the differences but the similarities.
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Sammy’s Adventures: The Secret Passage 3D

This delightful, kid-friendly eco-adventure utilizes the immersive 3D experience to the fullest: you will feel like you are snorkeling in a fabulously colorful, animated undersea world. When Sammy and his fellow turtle hatchlings are born, they face a dangerous journey from shore to sea, a trek that can seem like a marathon to a newborn sea turtle. Before they reach the surf, Sammy and a young female turtle named Shelly are scooped up by seagulls, and Sammy must act fast to save them both. Only hours old and already a hero, Sammy is almost too exhausted to continue on his path to the ocean, and the two part ways as Shelly begins her new life at sea. But a lifetime of adventure is in store for Sammy as he begins a 50-year odyssey, inspired by the real experience of a sea turtle. Along the way he gets washed ashore and adopted by a commune of hippies who draw a peace sign on his shell — carrying this proud symbol on his back, he crosses the globe making friends and facing obstacles from oil spills to natural predators as he tries to reunite with his long lost Shelly. Film features stunning, vibrant 3D visuals and a soundtrack peppered with pop songs from Bruno Mars and Michael Jackson.
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The Dreams of Jinsha

Five years in the making, Chen Deming’s Oscar®-shortlisted, animated feature blends Chinese history and mythology in a time-travel, fantasy adventure — as a young boy from Beijing hurtles back in time 3,000 years to the Jinsha Kingdom and finds himself at the center of an ancient prophecy. Entering a world of sweeping hand-drawn landscapes filled with serene rivers, spirit-filled forests, and seas of lotus blossoms, the boy Xiao Long meets a young princess riding a white lion, who escorts him to the palace of the Jinsha king. There he discovers that his arrival has been pre-ordained, and that the pendant that hangs around his neck — a gift from his father — has the power to either bring peace or unleash untold devastation upon the Kingdom and its people. Longing to return home, but also enchanted by his surroundings and newfound friends, Xiao Long faces a difficult choice between leaving the past behind, or staying and risking his life to save Jinsha. The animators clearly drew inspiration from the work of Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli fans will note references to Castle in the Sky, Nausicaa, and The Cat Returns) to create this epic but child-friendly fable about friendship, power, and self-sacrifice.
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Boy

Using his own childhood hometown as a luscious backdrop, Oscar®-nominated director Taika Waititi delivers a delightfully playful, delicately poignant film that gracefully scales comedy and drama and is simply a joy to watch. It is 1984, Michael Jackson rules the airwaves, and eleven-year-old “Boy” lives with his kid brother and a slew of cousins in a small, dirt-poor community tucked away amongst the lazy beaches of rural New Zealand. Boy spends his days trying to impress crush Chardonnay with his “Thriller” dance moves and fantasizing about the day his father will come home from jail to take him on amazing adventures. When his father finally does return, it is not for familial bonding, but to dig up the bag of money he hid while running from the police and to set up in the garage with his gang of hapless hooligans. It isn’t long before Boy realizes that his father is not the combination war hero/deep sea diver/rugby captain that he imagined him to be — but a loutish, selfish buffoon whose opulent delusions are even more childish than his own. It is a coming of age story for both father and son.
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Mars Needs Moms 3D

Be the first person on the planet to see Mars Needs Moms, Disney’s new 3D space adventure comedy from motion capture pioneers ImageMovers Digital (Polar Express) and producer Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump). Based on the beloved book by Pulitzer Prize-winning Berkeley Breathed, the film centers on sarcastic ‘tween Milo who is chafing under the rules and regs of a nagging mother he doesn’t appreciate. But when Mom is kidnapped by Martians in desperate need of Earth moms to raise their unruly young. Milo stows away on a spaceship in hot pursuit — and lands in an awe-inspiring, red-hued, futuristic world where the combination of wild technology and zero gravity provides plenty of fun and danger. With the help of slacker/hacker earthling Gribble and Martian girl-pal Ki, Milo sets out on a quest to find and save his mother. Featuring the voices of Seth Green, Joan Cusack and Dan Fogler.
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A Monster in Paris 3D

NYICFF 2012 opens with a classic misunderstood-monster tale, a warm-hearted musical about the power of song featuring Django Reinhardt-style gypsy guitar and honey-toned vocals courtesy of Sean Lennon. Paris, 1910. The streets of the city are flooded. A mist-enshrouded Eiffel Tower looms over a temporary lake and the alleyways sport makeshift bridges so Parisians can go about their daily routines. But spirits are high for the citizens of this romantic city, including those of Emile, a lovelorn film projectionist, and his inventor friend Raoul, whose enthusiasm for breaking rules places him and Emile at the center of some unintentional mischief after they sneak into a scientist’s laboratory greenhouse and unwittingly let loose a monster onto the soggy streets of Paris. Yet this terrible monster turns out to have a sad and sensitive soul — as well as musical talent — and when cabaret singer Lucille discovers the beast hiding backstage at the music hall, he dons a cape and hat and joins her act, instantly wowing the crowd with his silky smooth voice and hot guitar licks. Yet despite his peaceful demeanor, the City of Lights is in a panic, as the rotten rogue of a mayor plunges his police force headlong into a chaotic monster hunt that uses both the sweeping backdrops of Paris and 3D effects to the fullest.
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The Monkey King: Uproar in Heaven

This remarkable new film is actually a painstaking frame-for-frame restoration and 3D rendering of the original 1961 Wan Laiming masterpiece, a national treasure and China’s most celebrated and accomplished work of animation. Composed of gorgeously flowing animation created by hand from over 130,000 ink drawings and an opulent soundtrack inspired by the Beijing Opera, the film follows the adventures of the magical Monkey King of Flower Fruit Mountain, a mischievous character who creates havoc by refusing to bow down to the authority of the Celestial Jade Emperor. After stealing a powerful cudgel from the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea, the cheeky Monkey King challenges the established order of heaven, freeing horses from the imperial stables, disrupting imperial banquets and entering into epic battles with one colorful god after another — while snubbing his nose at the pompous formality of the heavenly court. Based on the classic Chinese story Journey to the West, the original film was made at the height of the country’s golden period of animation and was released just months before the entire film industry was shut down by the Cultural Revolution. It is a truly stunning work of animation and mythological storytelling, far surpassing anything China has produced before or since.
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The Pirates! Band of Misfits

Aaargh! NYICFF is extremely proud to present the epic new claymation adventure from four-time Academy Award®-winning stop-motion masters, Aardman Animations. Directed by Aardman founder (and former NYICFF jury member) Peter Lord, Pirates is the high seas saga of hapless Pirate Captain and his crew of extremely silly and witless pirate fools. With his rag-tag crew at his side, and seemingly blind to the impossible odds stacked against him, the boundlessly enthusiastic Captain embarks on a quest to be named Pirate of the Year — a voyage that takes us from the shores of exotic Blood Island to the foggy streets of Victorian London and encounters with Queen Elizabeth, a young Charles Darwin, and a colorful assortment of ruthless pirate adversaries. But in his increasingly desperate drive for greatness, our gung-ho Captain risks alienating his only true friends and losing what is most dear to him.
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Mia & The Migoo

NYICFF presents the world premiere of the new English language version of Mia & the Migoo, which was NYICFF opening night film in 2009 and went on to win Best Animated Feature at the European Film Awards. Created from an astounding 500,000 hand-painted frames of animation, the film is breathtakingly beautiful and thrilling adventure that pits wild-haired young heroine Mia against profit-hungry developers, with the future of life on Earth in the balance. One night Mia has a premonition. So after saying a few words of parting at her mother’s grave, she sets out on a cross-continent journey across mountains and jungles to search for her father, who has been trapped in a landslide at a disaster-plagued construction site on a remote tropical lake. In the middle of the lake stands the ancient and gnarled Tree of Life, watched over by innocent, bumbling forest spirits called the Migoo, who grow and change shape as they please, morphing from small childlike beings to petulant giants. It is the Migoo who have been sabotaging the construction to protect this sacred site and — now together with Mia — they join in a fight to find Mia’s father and save the Tree.
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Cinderella Moon

Based on the earliest known version of Cinderella, the Chinese tale “Ye Xian” from 768 A.D., cinematographer Richard Bowen’s wonder-filled feature debut is a gorgeous and enchanting fairytale, with exquisitely ornate costumes, dazzling scenery shot in Yunnan Province, and an underlying message that is as timely today as it was thirteen centuries ago. In a mythical kingdom, a girl is born. The village shaman had foretold a boy and Mei Mei’s father is sorely disappointed. Years later with her mother gone, Mei Mei is left with nothing but a pair of bejeweled slippers and the hope that one day she will get to dance at the Festival of the Full Moon. Meanwhile, the kingdom has been thrown out of balance — the moon is stuck in the sky — and the handsome young king is commanded by his mother to take a wife to restore the celestial harmony. But the king refuses to have a child with a woman he does not truly love. One day, peering through a telescope from his island home, the king spies Mei Mei floating on air in her magical slippers. Convinced that he’s seen an angel, he sets out in search for her— but she runs off, losing one bejeweled slipper along the way.
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Time of Eve

Covering territory explored by Blade Runner and I, Robot (the film makes frequent allusions to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics), Time of Eve is an exquisitely drawn, sci-fi allegory that probes questions of artificial intelligence while flirting with the moral and personal implications of human-robot romance. It is the future and household androids are becoming common. Completely lifelike and indistinguishable from humans, androids are programmed to serve with devotion — so it is no wonder that high schooler Rikuo begins to have unsettling feelings towards his android Sammy, feelings heightened when he discovers a curious phrase recorded in her activity log, “Are you enjoying the Time of Eve?” Investigating with his buddy Masaki, they discover an enigmatic underground café, a robot safe-zone, where androids and humans interact as equals — in apparent violation of guidelines set by the all-powerful Robot Ethics Committee. Inside the café distinctions between human and android are blurred and both seem to reveal layers of emotional complexity not apparent in the outside world.
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