VFX After Annecy, 'WADE' wins at OFF, Fantasia and ShortStop Festival -

After Annecy, ‘WADE’ wins at OFF, Fantasia and ShortStop Festival

Still from WADE

Kolkata based Ghost Animation’s animated film WADE is on a winning spree! The animated short on climate change has already grabbed many eyeballs in India and beyond. 

Post bagging the ‘City of Annecy Award’ at Annecy 2020, ‘Audience Award’ at Brooklyn Film festival and ‘Best Art Direction Award’ at Animayo Las Palmas festival, Gran Canaria, WADE has lately won ‘Best Animated Short’ at ShortStop Festival, ‘Artist Award’ at Odense Film Festival (OFF), Satoshi Kon Award for ‘Best Animated Short Film’ at Fantasia international Film Festival.

Thrilled at the recent wins, co-directors Upamanyu Bhattacharyya and Kalp Sanghvi shared with Animation Xpress, “We’re both quite happy and thankful to all the festivals, and hope the film continues to draw attention to the scope of Indian animation and to the impending threat of climate change.”

WADE is a crucial animated short film that makes people sit up and notice the impending doom of Climate Change that’s looming large. With the recent wreckage caused by super cyclones, floods all across the country and globe, WADE depicts the adversities of climate change, and nightmarish consequences of taking Nature for granted. 

Kalp Sanghvi (left) and Upamanyu Bhattacharyya

Set in a dystopian future in Kolkata, ravaged by sea level rise, a group of humans and an ambush of tigers face off on the flooded streets in this struggle for existence. The tigers have migrated to the city as the world’s largest delta, the Sunderbans have been completely destroyed. This 10 minute long film was in a way encouraged by Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement in the way it validated a lot of its narrative.