“I’m definitely anticipating lots of swirly colours, and strobes.” Keir-La Janisse laughs. She’s the Administrative and Programming Coordinator at the
Toronto Animated Image Society (TAIS), an artist-run centre on Dufferin Street that provides support, inspiration, and training to animators. This year, TAIS’s annual animation showcase will centre on psychedelia; hence the swirling colours.
”At our AGM back in the fall, we took a vote for various different theme ideas. They ranged from cats to the occult, and psychedelic was the one everyone liked. There’s a lot of ways you can interpret that as animator; it just means something that’s mind-expanding or trippy or weird. There’s a lot of room to be experimental,” Janisse explains. Animators can
submit films up to ten minutes long until May 15, and the selected films will screen at Cinecycle on July 25. The audience can expect a mix of Canadian and international work, culled from over 300 submissions.
Beyond the showcase, TAIS focuses on providing support to its members, and inspiration to the larger community. Fans of animation can get a TAIS supporting membership, while a studio memberships allows people to use the TAIS space for their work and gives them access to specialized equipment like animation kits and large-format scanners. They offers a paid artists’ residency, funded by the Petman Foundation, that allows an animator six months of studio space. TAIS also teams up with local organizations to bring animations workshops out into the world. “We did one at UT Schools for a hundred kids. We had four animation kits and five instructors, and the kids made some really cool shorts,” Janisse says. They’re also partnering with Sketch and TIFF for a youth-oriented workshop.
But events like the Animation Showcase really bring the spirit of what TAIS does to the forefront. It’s the city’s “most non-industry-related animation showcase event,” Janisse says. “There’s lots of animation in Toronto, but this is a very different mindset from the big companies. These are people who are literally making animated film with their own hands and their own money. This is auteur work.”