What will or won't be

A little backtrack on the last post that went up here, it turns out that Speed won't be seeing its Japanese premiere this month at the Tokyo Anime Award Festival as the event has unfortunately been cancelled due to the growing COVID-19 coronavirus concerns. It's disappointing but I completely understand their position in a difficult time and it's an honour to have been officially selected for such a highly-regarded festival in intent at least. They haven't ruled out the possibility of a future screening outside of the proposed dates so I'll keep you folks posted if that comes along.

Cheerier news is that the Cardiff Animation Festival, scheduled for the first week of April at the fantastic Chapter arts venue, is so far still going ahead and has this week unveiled its full programme of events. As well as Speed being part of their Shorts 3 screening (2:45pm April 2nd and 12:45pm April 5th) and Laura-Beth's new film The Gift in Shorts 2 (1pm April 2nd and 1:45pm April 3rd), there's a ton of brilliant events to check out. A few highlights off the top of my head are an Aardman exhibition, special editions of Cardiff Animation Nights and Animation Grill, talks by animation talents Lorraine Lordan, Simon Chong, Avgousta Zoureldi and Kyle Legall as well as panels on storytelling, producing animation and industry inclusion (on the back of a very insightful recent Skwigly piece by Tanya Scott, who'll be participating).
As with the first edition of CAF I'll also be hosting the Animator's Brunch sessions along with Laura-Beth on the Saturday and Sunday morning at 10am, so swing by to hear about the amazing shorts being shown from the filmmakers themselves.
Passes are sold out but individual tickets are still available so act fast!