Celebrate International Animation Day with Asifa-Israel and the Goethe Institute! In homage to the “International Tournée of Animation” and Prescot Wright, a program of select works from leading international animators will be presented at the Goethe Institute on Tuesday, October 19 from 19:00 to 21:00. The event is free and open to the public. The program will include films by Richard Williams, Yōji Kuri, Raoul Servay, Bob Godfrey, John Whitney and more…
In the mid-60s Wikipedia reports that “it was almost impossible to see quality animation in the US” – members of ASIFA-Hollywood put together an animation program and when Prescott Wright joined the American Film Institute in 1969, he was asked to head the project. Under Wright’s direction it became known as the “International Tournée of Animation” – an annual touring program of short animated films from different countries that existed from about 1970 to the late 1980s.
ASIFA – the International Animated Film Association, proclaimed October 28th as “International Animation Day” to commemorate the first public performance of Emile Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique at the Musée Grévin in Paris in 1892. Pre-dating the work of the Lumière Brothers (1895), Reynaud, a French inventor, created the Praxinoscope – an improved version of the Zoetrope, replacing the viewing slits with an inner circle of 12 mirrors, enabling several people to view the film at once and enhancing the image. Many versions later, in 1988, he had developed a larger projection version that not only allowed the images to be viewed against a background, but also enabled a continuous series of moving images, rather than the previous version’s 12 image limit.
Goethe Institute, Beit Asia, 4 Weizman Street, Tel Aviv