KAFI’s roster of speakers grows

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:         From: Tom Thinnes (269) 488-4280

Three additional speakers with connections to major studios have been added to the roster of Kalamazoo Animation Festival International (KAFI) main presenters in May, joining a comedy writer who has been involved with “The Simpsons” for more than half of its 20-year run.

Mike Reiss, a four-time Emmy winner for co-producing more than 200 episodes and penning a dozen “Simpson” scripts, will be featured on Friday, May 18, at 7 p.m. in the State Theater.

Others agreeing to podium duties during the May 17-20 festival in downtown Kalamazoo are:

• Charlie Bonifacio, an animation veteran with Disney credentials for “Return to Never Land,” and “Mulan,” and for several “Star Wars” animated productions for television and “Beetlejuice.”
• Karen Aqua, whose animation has been featured regularly on “Sesame Street” and, since 1976, has been creating award-winning animated films exploring the themes of ritual, journeys, transformation, and the human spirit that have been screened nationally and internationally.
• Jacques Drouin, a member of the National Film Board in Canada who studied filmmaking at UCLA and is one of the few in his profession still using the technique known as “pinscreen animation.”

The fourth KAFI has attracted more than 500 entries from 35 countries. They will be competing for $15,000 in prize money and a bit of national glory.

In addition to entries submitted by major studios, independents and aspiring student animators from across the United States, also entered in a dozen divisions in four major categories are animated shorts and films produced in: Canada, Australia, Mexico, Bangladesh, Scotland, Belgium, Great Britain, Turkey, Brazil, The Czech Republic, Thailand, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, France, Spain, Germany, South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Serbia, Ireland, Russia, Portugal, Israel, Poland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, China, Malaysia, The Netherlands, and New Zealand.

The next step is for KAFI creative director Ellen Besen and several colleagues to winnow the entrants to a field of around 100 finalists. Their decisions will be announced in mid-March.

Three judges will then receive CDs containing all of the finalist entries to begin the process of selecting winners. They will be named at the festival’s wrap-up event on Sunday, May 20. At the three previous KAFIs, entrants have been nominated for Academy Awards and went on to earn Oscars in their fields. Aqua is one of the three judges.

“An Evening with Mike Reiss” will be a ticketed event open to the public during the four-day festival in downtown Kalamazoo. At around 11 p.m., a second event will be a showing of his film, “Queer Duck: The Movie.” Tickets for that are $6.

His participation is being sponsored by the Arcus Gay and Lesbian Fund.

The competitions, screenings, professional development, and networking interaction between today’s and tomorrow’s animators will fill the May 17-20 festival.

There will be professional-development seminars led by animators who are knee-deep in the industry’s technology age, training sessions for students, workshops that explore animation as a career, and portfolio reviews. Students can learn what it takes to get into the animation business and gain a grasp of the state of the industry.

One of the festival’s unique attractions, "The Cartoon Challenge," selects 10 teams from animation programs spanning North America who engage in a "24/7" cartoon-creating competition prior to the convening of the festival.

The teams selected to compete arrive at the KVCC Center for New Media on the Sunday preceding festival week and bivouac there. Over a four-day period, their objective is to conceive, script, design and produce up to a 30-second, animated public-service announcement on a topic chosen by the event’s sponsor. The winning school receives scholarship funds for animation students. The “Cartoon Challenge” teams will be notified on March 9.

“There will be five screenings of new films in competition,” Besen said, “and some of these screenings will be repeated later in the festival. As for the individual programs, rather than being strongly themed, they will each tend to be more like a variety show with an interesting and complementary selection of films from each category.

“There will be one show on Saturday morning that is definitely targeted for the family audience,” she said. “All the others will for adult viewers. There will be a mix of funny and serious films in all the screenings, though I will be aiming to make the shows on Friday and Saturday evening more engaging for the general public by emphasizing the lighter films and adding more humor.”

The final showing at the State Theater at the end of the festival will be the capstone event when the winners will be announced.

Kalamazoo’s Irving S. Gilmore Foundation has joined the college in being the major underwriter of all four festivals. All of the activities and events will be held in the Center for New Media, KVCC’s Anna Whitten Hall, the State Theater, and the Kalamazoo Valley Museum.

KAFI is now a biennial event, sharing the every-other-year format with the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival that brings world-famous performers to downtown Kalamazoo for two weeks in May of even-numbered years.

Nuts-and-bolts information and updates about all KAFI activities -- dates, times, location, tickets, and entry information-- is available at this webpage -- http://kafi.kvcc.edu -- or by calling Maggie Noteboom at the festival office at (269) 373-7883.

Reiss, a 47-year-old Harvard graduate now living in California, served as an editor of both The Harvard Lampoon and The National Lampoon.

That prepped him to become involved with “The Simpsons,” which was created by Matt Groening and went on the air in 1987 as part of a real-person sit-com and evolved into its own half-hour series on Fox three years later, as a writer and co-producer in its third season.

The series is known for lampooning almost every aspect of the human condition, American culture, society in general, and television itself. As a satirical parody of the Middle-American lifestyle, it has retained its freshness and relevancy because Reiss is among a cadre of writers and co-producers who have contributed to its staying power that will be celebrated by its 20th anniversary this coming April. A feature-length movie is scheduled to be released in July.

With a “nothing is sacred” approach to topics and issues, “The Simpsons,” its writers and producers have attracted more than a bit of heat from parents’ groups and conservatives because their main characters in the dysfunctional family aren’t exactly “role models.” Commented one: “We are trying to strengthen the American family, to make them more like ‘The Waltons’ and less like ‘The Simpsons.’”

Meanwhile, the rest of the nation and much of the world have been laughing like crazy at the animated series, which was almost cancelled before it hit the air and which Time magazine has labeled “the greatest TV show of the 20th century.”

“The Simpsons” was the first TV series on the Fox network to appear in the top-30 highest-rated shows of the season. Several episodes have been viewed by more than 30 million people in their night-time slots.

Reiss has been more than a one-trick pony in his career as a comedy writer. He’s created material for Johnny Carson, Eddie Murphy and Garry Shandling. Reiss is also the co-creator of “The Critic,” the animated TV series about a movie critic that is part of the Comedy Central lineup of shows.

“Queer Duck” is the animated adventures of a gay duck. Following Reiss’ commentary and one of the festival’s competitive screenings, it will be shown at the State Theater beginning at around 11 p.m. For those who only want to see the film, tickets will be $6.

“There were two things that upset me and led to writing ‘Queer Duck,’” Reiss said. “Back in 2000, there was an article in New York Magazine that reported the core audience for ‘Sex in the City’ was gay men. We all know that now, but at the time that was news because there was no ‘Will & Grace’ or ‘Queer as Folk.’ The closest thing to gay men on TV were those four sluts? I got very upset.

“I wondered,” Reiss said, “why is a large chunk of our population being ignored, while at the same time Dr. Laura Schlessinger had declared war on gay people.”

Schlessinger’s rhetoric, he said, became so sharp that radio stations began to drop her syndicated show, enough that she attempted to apologize through a newspaper ad.

“She was simply spreading hate and homophobia,” Reiss said. “So I wrote the first ‘Queer Duck’ cartoon and envisioned Dr. Laura as Elmer Fudd and Queer Duck as a gay version of Bugs Bunny. For being such a relentlessly happy cartoon, it actually came out of things that made me angry at society.”

In addition to being an award-winning mystery writer, the KAFI keynoter has written for Esquire and Games Magazine.