festival
Animator 2026 awards expose Poland’s current stop-motion and craft-animation network
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.
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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Animator 2026 awards expose Poland’s current stop-motion and craft-animation network — Source video Plays on YouTube Creator / source
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People
- Maciek Szczerbowski
- Chris Lavis
- Lee Oz
- Eliška Oz
- Piotr Chmielewski
Sources
Listed so you can verify every claim. Animator International Animated Film Festival · The Girl Who Cried Pearls | OFFICIAL TRAILER (NFB)
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