AWN’s Animation Pimp and Ottawa Animation Festival artistic director Chris Robinson takes a look at five feature films worth your hungover attention at this year’s Annecy International Animation Festival, which runs June 13-18.

The Island, Anca Damian, Romania/France/Belgium, 85 minutes

Here’s a rare case of someone who is really making an admirable career out of creating innovative and diverse animated features. Anca Damian, whose previous works, The Magic Mountain (2015) and Marona’s Fantastic Tale (2019) couldn’t be more different, returns with The Island (2022), which might be her best work yet.

Oh-so-loosely based on Daniel Defoe’s famous novel, “Robinson Crusoe” (1719), Damian takes the basic story of a man (with the glorious name, Robinson) adrift on an island and from there creates a magic realist lo-fi musical that fuses Luis Bunuel and Masaaki Yuasa with mermaids, refugees, and broken families.

The result is what has to be the most upbeat, wild work about pretty dour situations. Don’t ask me how Damian pulled it off. Maybe it’s the collage, the bold, beautiful colors, a work drenched in warm sea blues.

We’re never quite sure if this is all (like Crusoe) in Robinson’s head as he sits adrift on a rock drowning in sorrow and madness, recounting characters from his past as a doctor, father, son, lover…

Like Mait Laas’s Lisa Limone and Maroc Orange: A Rapid Love Story (2014), The Island is a light musical that lures us into a deeper and darker story that aptly reflects the maddening chaos of globalisation and just downright awful human behaviour.