Festival of Animation Berlin 2026 runs its second Stop-Motion Summit and takes a puppet to the Rotes Rathaus

The ninth Festival of Animation Berlin (FAB) runs from 8 to 11 October 2026 at silent green Kulturquartier and City Kino Wedding, and stop motion has its own day. The Stop-Motion Summit, back for a second edition inside the festival's Berlin Animation HUB, filled Atelier 2 at silent green on 9 October with four presentations. Damir Šuša opened at 10:30 with his satirical film The Black Smoke of Prediction... At noon fabricator, painter and designer Susanna Jerger gave case studies of miniature set fabrication from the productions she has worked on over the past decade, including Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio and Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs, covering materials, techniques and the practical side of set construction. At 14:00 Andy Kaiser made the case for in-camera effects -- hanging miniatures, live matte paintings, rear and front projection -- and showed front projection using the system originally used on Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (Himmel über Berlin). The day closed at 15:30 with the animation team of Superbuhei: Sofie Kienzle, Alexander Dannhauser and Christian Manzke, with director Josef Brandl. Superbuhei is a 105-minute live-action horror-comedy, shot in 2025, that contains 11 minutes of stop-motion animation combined with analogue cut-out animation; it opens in German cinemas on 11 November 2026.

The festival began its stop-motion programme in public. On 2 October the Stop Motion Walk animated a larger-than-life bear on a bicycle frame by frame in front of Berlin's Rotes Rathaus. Berlin stop-motion animators Dina Velikovskaya and Sana Schönle of the studio TORP designed and built the figure, and passers-by were invited to help animate it. FAB presents the event as a celebration of handmade animation and of the people who make it, and as a way to draw attention to how hard the animation community is finding it to secure funding. Hands-on sessions run through the weekend: a clay animation workshop for 9- to 12-year-olds with Izabela Plucinska (11 October), Daniel Sterlin-Altman's collective under-camera workshop Mop-Stotion Storytelling (10 October), a pixilation workshop for children with Petra Stipetić at the Deutsche Kinemathek (10 October), and Jannis Esselbrügge's talk on transformation and body horror in clay animation (11 October). The festival's awards are given on 11 October; stop-motion winners will be added to this story if there are any.