I mention the Fantasia Film festival fairly often on this site. It’s one of the few events with a large audience I still make time for every year.
Fantasia started out as a festival focused on Asian cinema and Anime in 1996, when streaming was a distant dream and subs far from a guarantee. Getting your hands on Japanese animation in Montreal, let alone in a language you could understand, was a rare treat worthy of celebration. So three friends, Martin Sauvageau, André Dubois and Pierre Corbeil decided to pool whatever ressources they could to bring this great gift to the eager french Canadian masses.
It was a labour of love, if not exactly organization. In those early years, show times were a vague suggestion and it wasn’t uncommon for you to wait over an hour after the movie should have started just to get in the feather. And since you couldn’t find Anime elsewhere, you really had to get there at least an hour in advance if you wanted a decent seat. Especially if you were more than two people who wanted to sit together.
There was no concession, you occasionally were stuck in the isle. The occasionally very creative subtitles could be almost impossible to see because of colour and font. Sometimes they would dip below the image and disappear altogether. It was often loud. And absolutely magical!
Everyone, from organizer, to special guest to simple fan was incredibly psyched to be there. Audiences were electric and boisterous. Hooting and hollering! Responding to characters on the screen. Audibly gasping. They would break out in standing ovations in the middle of particularly rewarding scenes or start laughing at everything when the movie got boring.
A fantasia crowd was a unique beast that transformed your movie viewing experience. Seeing a movie there was just different from seeing the same movie under different circumstances. It was a time were there were no real anime community online so for many people this was your once a year shot to talk about something you loved. Everyone was welcomed, even if you were a complete novice. We couldn’t afford to gatekeep! It was great in its way.
With time the festival grew immensely, becoming one of the bigger ones. They added screening rooms and found more suitable venues. The number of movies increased and genre selection widened. They traded in that frantic atmosphere a bit for efficiency. Movies start on time, there’s a concession stand and plenty of bathrooms. You can always read the subtitles and the projectionist never shows the wrong movie. The crowd is respectful and unobstructive. There’s still no gatekeeping but I also don’t talk with strangers about the movies I just saw so maybe there is. It’s like going to the teather.
It’s been that way for a while now.
Why am I telling you this? Because I went to see 4 movies at Fantasia this year: Human Lost, Relative Worlds, Twilight and Promare. I am going to tell you all about it in the coming weeks. And this year, for the first time in a while, we had a fantasia crowd! It was magical. Surely it affected my viewing experience and my reviews. That’s fine! But before I talk about movies I just wanted to talk about movie festivals. If you have the chance, go! With an opened mind. Have fun! It’s a unique experience and you should try it once. Then you can tell us about it!!!!
Atmosphere is everything at these kind of events. I’m sure it was awesome to reexperience what the fantasia crowd feels like. I’m jealous you got to see Promare, it’s a film I’m really interested in. I’ll be looking forward to your thoughts on it!
I’m looking forward to sharing them! It was quite fun
What an exhilarating experience—-you’ll definitely have to share more of your thoughts on these films!
I will
I can’t wait to read what you thought about those films. 🤩🤩
Awesome
Dang that sounds like such a cool experience!! I don’t know much about film festivals but this sounds like a lot of fun! I might have to look into visiting some festivals like this myself in the future 😀
It’s a unique experience. You can add it to your travel repertoire
That’s very true! Thanks for the idea 😀
It sounds like immense fun!
I like it!
I definitely enjoyed your write-up on the Fantasia Film Festival. Funny enough, I mentioned it in my last award post as one place I would like to visit if I had the opportunity to go there for free. That looks like a great film festival. In the Midwest where I’m from, we don’t have that much expect the occasional smaller festival or the Chicago International Film Festival which I’ve been to once before. The first time I heard about Fantasia was when I found out that Jungle Emperor Leo (1997) made its North American debut over there despite Disney trying to ban it for painfully obvious reasons (the rip-off attempted to sue the original!). One film review blog I follow has been covering the movies played this year and it looks like a good ba
**batch of films for the program.
Unfortunately Montreal isn’t all that cheap
So I’ve heard.
Nice! We unfortunately don’t have many film festivals here: but we do have animecon, an event that I sadly had to miss out on this year because of my health.
But this festival surely does sound magical: I like how it became something really big out of something that started up in kind of a modest way so to speak. Looking forward to you posts, especially Human Lost, as I still don’t exactly know what it’s about and seeing you mentioned it to me I really have gotten curious. But that said, of course I look forward to all the other ones as well! Great to hear you had such an awesome time! 😊
But I remeber you going to some conventions! That seemed like a lo of fun too
I went to Dutch Comic Con early this year. But that is just a convention to buy stuff. Animecon is really the special one because it really gives you the feeling you have immersed yourself in Japan for an entire weekend. But I do plan on going again next year if my health stays like it right now😊😊
Sweet!