Animasyros brought more than 280 films from 50 countries to Ermoupoli, Greece, for its 19th consecutive year of celebrations. Its opening film took aim at a society where companies try to dehumanise people.
The programme covered seven competition sections: International, Student, K.ID.S, AnimaPride, National Competition, TV & Commissioned Films and Feature Films. The festival also featured Irish animation, a theme marking 200 years of Ermoupoli, educational workshops, parallel events, international collaborations and an industry market that has become a reference point for animation in the Eastern Mediterranean. The next festival will mark its 20th anniversary.
A society staged for sale
The festival opened with the Greek premiere of Decorado, by Goya-winning Spanish creator Alberto Vásquez. The Embassy of Spain in Greece and the Cervantes Institute supported the screening. Decorado received the Paul Grimault award at this year’s Annecy animation festival and was described as an animated version of The Truman Show.
José Luis Ágreda, the film’s creative director, called it “a parable, a dark parable about our society and the way in which each of us, every individual, feels within it.” He said the film examines “how society or, more specifically, companies try to dehumanise people.” Arnold, its unemployed central character, finds the world strange and disconnected from his reality. Funny animal characters lead viewers into a dystopia that grows darker, Ágreda said, reflecting today’s world.
The film borrows from classic American animation but gives it an unfamiliar twist. Ágreda described a world that looks happy, “like the society they try to sell us,” while something rotten sits inside it. Unusual colours and combinations turn what appears to be a dream into a nightmare.
Ágreda also compared Arnold’s experience to social media: people can feel they’re at the centre of attention while everything around them is constructed and fake. “We live in a society that stays with appearance and not with being,” he said. The characters play roles on a set and don’t know what is happening around them; the appearance of perfection, the film suggests, distracts from society’s major problems.
Who makes the sound, who tells the story
Montreal-based Canadian sound designer Olivier Calvert led a masterclass on sound as a storytelling tool. His credits include the Oscar-nominated short film The Girl Who Cried Pearls, and he joined the Oscar-winning sound team for Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. Animasyros paid tribute to his work and screened a selection of films.
Calvert said sound can work through familiar noises—“birds, traffic noise, the sea, the waves”—or operate beneath conscious attention to create tension. “Sound is the filter through which you look at the image,” he said. In animation, where “everything is constructed,” sound need not imitate a natural environment; instead, it can help create a different world.
He described working early with directors and shaping stories through collaboration with the director and composer. “The challenge is to build a story through the collaboration between images and sounds,” he said. Calvert called the director, composer and sound designer a “very important” trio. The soundtrack brings music and sound effects together.
Awards across the programme
The Grand Prize of the International Competition went to Please by Anna Mantzaris. Konstantinos Demis won the Greek Competition for The Dog. Gauze, a film about Palestine made by five students from GOBELINS Paris—Noran Fikri Alezabi, Nicholas Arujah, Xinyue Ma, Yulin YUE and Xiaonan Zhou—won the Student Competition.
Saltwater by Eilidh Nicoll of the United Kingdom won the Television and Commissioned Films category. Eyeliner by Aisha Boujilouli received the AnimaPride prize; the section featured films with LGBTQI+ content, queer expression and acceptance. The K.ID.S first prize went to The Eagle and the Kinglet by Paul Jadoul of the Czech Republic, while Martin Lund’s Unstoppable received the Audience Award. The coverage also pointed to wider animation activity, including the Egyptian first animated feature, which took 20 years to make, and Merike Estna’s The House of Leaking Sky at the Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2026.