Damián Perea: “The stigma that animation is a children’s product is Disney’s fault

Damián Perea started the ANIMAYO Animation Film Festival project thirteen years ago. In the last seven the festival has made its roaming in Lanzarote. While in his beginning Perea grew up having only Steven Spielberg as a reference in a road without opportunities to develop his passion for animation, now ANIMAYO continues to work to generate different paths for present and future Canarian creators.

The last one has been the seventh edition of Animayo in Lanzarote: screenings, workshops, masterclasses … Do you have the feeling that the festival has been growing and is based on the island?
Totally. Lanzarote, along with Los Angeles, was the first itinerant Animayo. It is an island that I have always been very fond of, I even made a commercial for Pepsi here. Always the welcome has been very good and that is why every year we deliberately try to grow in some of the activities. This year we grew exponentially, both in guests and in number of workshops. Also, as we qualify for the Oscars, the arrival of shortfilms this year has been immense.

On other occasions you have said that Animayo is focus in professional education.
Now I would add that it is also focus for the general public. It may seem that there is a sector of the population that sees animation as something remote, but it is the opposite because animation is the present. The prototype of virtual reality that has been presented in this edition, the Magic Leap, proves that the world will start to be completely different to what we are used to. Basically it is reaching a point where reality is mixed with virtual reality and this can be applied to both cinema and video games. To everything. Even in work meetings because we can have a meeting with a person who is in New York, but at the same time is by our side. For the Canary Islands it will be a tremendous change because we will no longer feel isolated from the world.

Then, the resources that are available to perform animation have increased. Are the works getting better?
One of the objectives we set at the beginning of the project was to develop functional intelligences in children. Now these children are still forming and we are still in the process of creating that critical mass that judges the work that is done. One day someone will ask why there are so many kids who do animation in Lanzarote and the answer will be that there has been a cause and a effect. We have the example in Gran Canaria, where we already have thirteen editions of the festival and where the guys who started to look at the animation at that time are already working in the industry. Now there are companies that come to the Canary Islands to find employees and settle. In ten years there will be directors, producers, animators of the Canary Islands in the world and this will be the result of the work we have been doing. That’s why Animayo was born, to create opportunities that did not exist when I started.

Is the public getting rid of that vision of animation as a merely children’s product?
That has always been the stigma of animation and this is Disney’s fault. On the handa, Disney achieved that the animation was something universal What happens is that, on the other hand, it created in the audience the concept that animation is linked to children and the family. Nowadays, animation is everything: cinema, videogames, advertising, cinematic, virtual reality … With festivals like this one, each time you can cultivate more the awareness of the public. A clear example is that in the first year of the festival the audience prize was a for a fun-not-serious shortfilm, but already the last two public awards are two amazing short films, better even than those that have been awarded by the jury. There comes a day when you already know how to judge what you are seeing and that is what is happening.

Is there also an evolution in the thinking of society?
This year the prize for the children’s audience was directed to a gay-themed short film. Children think openly, it is when they grow up trash is put in their heads. The children did not see beyond the love story. That is very beautiful.

In Los Angeles, one year was dedicated entirely to women.
Not only did we do it in Los Angeles, but we started in Gran Canaria and we have done it in all the venues. We were the first festival in the world that devoted all its programming entirely to the work done by women. When I was little I had a reference that was Steven Spielberg, but I realized that girls did not have any referent so it is necessary to give voice to empowered women within the industry to create references among girls