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Animator 2026 awards expose Poland’s current stop-motion and craft-animation network

Poster for The Girl Who Cried Pearls, screened with live orchestral accompaniment at the Animator 2026 closing ceremony
Poster for The Girl Who Cried Pearls, screened with live orchestral accompaniment at the Animator 2026 closing ceremony Source

The 19th Animator International Animated Film Festival in Poznań announced its winners on 11 July 2026. The programme placed craft-led animation alongside drawn, digital and experimental work: the closing ceremony included a screening of Maciek Szczerbowski and Chris Lavis’s puppet film The Girl Who Cried Pearls with live orchestral accompaniment, while the animated music-video prize went to the Czech plasticine production WildBait by Oberka. The audience short-film award went to Piotr Chmielewski’s Beetles, giving SMDB several concrete titles and makers to verify rather than treating the festival as a generic animation feed.

Video source — Animator 2026 awards expose Poland’s current stop-motion and craft-animation network
Video source — Animator 2026 awards expose Poland’s current stop-motion and craft-animation network Source

Structurally, Animator is also a high-value recurring discovery source. Its international, Polish, student, feature and music-video competitions connect Polish producers and schools to makers across Europe, Asia and the Americas, and its ANIMATOR PRO programme provides a separate route into production companies, commissioning bodies and professional networks. The festival archive should therefore be crawled edition by edition, with physical stop-motion technique verified title by title before catalogue promotion.

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Listed so you can verify every claim. Animator International Animated Film Festival · The Girl Who Cried Pearls | OFFICIAL TRAILER (NFB)

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