Tampa Animation Festival

The Tampa Animation Festival runs from November 5 to 8 at the Charlene Gordon Theater at the University of Tampa, with more than 130 films expected across the four nights. The guest of honor is Brad Schiff, head of animation at Laika Studios, who's returning to the campus where he transferred in the early 1990s. Back then, animation professor Richard Protovin steered him toward stop-motion sculpting; Schiff graduated in 1993 and spent the following decades working on stop-motion television and feature films. Kubo and the Two Strings earned Academy Award nominations in both the animated-feature and visual-effects categories.

Schiff's presence anchors the first three nights: he'll screen Wildwood, ParaNorman, and Kubo and the Two Strings, with audience Q&As following each. The rest of the festival fills out with a broad range of animation from around the world, with the total count expected to hit 130 to 150 films over the course of the run. The festival is held at UT, where stop-motion animation is part of the BFA in Animation curriculum.

There's also a specific thread running through the programming that looks at how the industry is handling AI. The festival pairs handmade animation with that conversation: submissions ask filmmakers to describe their use of AI, and the program includes Dreams of Violets, an AI-generated film. It's a good way to see the two sides of the medium side by side—the tactile, frame-by-frame work Schiff is known for and the new tools changing how things get made.

Admission is free. The festival runs November 5 through 8 at the Charlene Gordon Theater in the Ferman Center for the Arts at the University of Tampa.