The award was announced Thursday on the closing day of the pitching and co-production forum.

Rasmussen was competing for Best director against Michaela Pavlátová for My Sunny Maad (Czech Republic); Florence Miailhe for The Crossing (France), and Julien Fournet for The Adventures of Pil (France).

The tripled Oscar-nominated refugee animation doc Flee continues its glorious journey towards the 94^th Academy Awards ceremony to be held in Hollywood March 27. Most recently, the 2021 Nordic Council Film Prize winner added a Best Feature trophy from the International IDA (International Documentary Association) Awards.

Other animation award winners announced Thursday at Cartoon Movie include Paris-based International sales agent Charades, voted Distributor of the Year, and Even Mice Belong in Heaven ‘s production partners Fresh Films (Czech Republic), Les Films du Cygne (France), Cinemart (Slovakia) and Animoon (Poland) recipients of the Producer of the Year award.

Between March 8-10, 913 participants from 42 countries, including 297 buyers attended the on-site animation pitching event. A total of 57 feature projects from 19 countries, worth €266.3 million, representing 77 hours of animation were pitched .

France brought the most projects (15), followed by Spain (8), Belgium and Norway (5 each), the Czech Republic (3), Denmark, Finland, Italy, Poland and Portugal (2) and Croatia, Cyprus, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands with one project each.

Among the buyers’ top 10 projects, Ireland’s 2D Little Caribou by Barry O’Donogue about a little Inuit girl and her brother living on the Arctic ice, was number 1, while Norway’s Just Super produced by Qvisten Animation ranked number 9 and Iceland’s Ploey 2 produced by GunHil number 10.

Among the top 10 European co-productions, Belgian-French Melville targeting young adults and adults was number 1 while the Norwegian/Belgian family film Titina ranked number 4.

Regarding trends, the growth of adult animation was confirmed, with 37% of projects targeting the mature age group (against 27% in 2021 and 21% in 2020).

Around a third of projects pitched (31.6%) were adaptations from books or comics and many established names in animation made their come back, such as Jørgen Lerdam (Niko-Beyond the Northern Lights), Rémi Chayé (Fleur), and Toby Genkel (The Amazing Maurice).

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