Viktória Traub’s short animation Shoes and Hooves won the award for Best Animation Film at the Guanajuato International Film Festival in Mexico, the National Film Institute (NFI) informed on Monday.
The statement highlighted that thanks to the Mexican award, the Hungarian animation is eligible for submission in the Best Short Film category at the Oscars.
As noted, Traub’s animation Shoes and Hooves takes place in a surreal world inhabited by hybrid human-animal creatures, exploring the dilemmas of connection, conformity, and self-acceptance.
The main character, Paula, a centaur girl who works as a pedicurist in a small town, longs for human legs. When she meets Arnold, a crocodile-man, they fall in love at first sight. Can the centaur girl find the path to self-identity? What is the cost of conformity and self-renunciation? These are the questions addressed by the short film, created using 2D hand-drawn animation techniques.
Traub graduated from the animation programme at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2008. She is currently a doctoral student specializing in multimedia at the same institution and serves as an assistant lecturer at the Eszterházy Károly Catholic University in Eger. Since 2008, she has worked as a freelance designer and animation director. Her films Iron Egg and Mermaids and Rhinos have been successfully featured at numerous festivals worldwide, with the latter being awarded the Best Animation Film of 2018 by the Hungarian Film Critics Association.
Shoes and Hooves premiered in June at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival and has since toured renowned festivals globally. It will next compete in Viborg, Denmark, and then at the Ottawa festival.
Shoes and Hooves was produced by Pi Productions with the support of the NFI, in co-production with Solaz Media and Paprika Studios, and with support from TV Paint. Post-production was carried out at the NFI Film Lab. The music was composed by Csaba Kalotás, with the screenplay co-written by the director alongside Zsuzsanna Bak and Polett Dus. The sound design was created by Zoltán Vadon, and the producer was Polett Dus, according to the statement.
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