Best of Ottawa 2026

Feature Grand Prize Winner: We Are Aliens
Sunday, September 27th, 5:00 pm
ByTowne Cinema
Rating: 13+

Shorts
Sunday, September 27th, 7:00 pm
ByTowne Cinema
Rating: Mature

Sunday, September 27th, 9:00 pm
ByTowne Cinema
Rating: Mature

The Best of Ottawa program showcases audience favourites and award winners from the 2026 Ottawa International Animation Festival competition. The screenings offer a sampling of exceptional animated short films that explore moments of humour, profundity, and inspiration. The works in this collection provide a unique cross-section of some of the best contemporary film artists from around the world.

OIAF 2026 Awards

Grand Prize for Short Animation
Grand Prize for Feature Animation

Category Awards:

Animated Short
Bento Box Award for Best Student Animation
Commissioned Animation
Platform Animation (formerly Animated Series)
Young Audiences 7+
Teen Audiences 13+

Craft Awards:

Script
The Animation Guild Craft Award for Best Design
XPPen Craft Award for Best Animation Technique
Sound Design

Other Awards:

Public Prize
Awarded for the best film of the short film competitions as selected by the audience.

CMF Award for Best Canadian Animation Film
Awarded for the most outstanding Canadian production in competition and Canadian panorama screenings.

Best Canadian Student Animation
Awarded for the most outstanding Canadian student animation work

Hélène Tanguay Award for Humour
Named for a long-time champion of the OIAF, this award is presented to the work that conveys the best sense of wild, dark or absurd humour.

Grand Prize for Short Animation 

Winner: Praying Mantis (dir. Joe Hsieh) 

Jury Comment: We were stunned by this films ability to take us into the selfless depths of maternal instincts using sharp metaphorical imagery, fully realized internal logic, and purposeful, powerful touches of violence. Congratulations to Joe Hsieh for Praying Mantis, this year’s Grand Prix winner of the OIAF. 

Grand Prize for Animated Feature 

Winner: We Are Aliens (dir. Kohei Kadowaki) 

Jury Comment: This film is about many seemingly ordinary stories that happen to us and around us all the time, but usually go unnoticed. Different points of view, with inventive mise-en-scène, and poetic perspectives make us see familiar uneventful things in a new light. The film skillfully captures the incredible drama and absurdity of life with a twisted sense of humour, where coincidences and silly entanglements gradually reveal themselves as simple , but yet painful misunderstandings. Presented as a series of everyday tableaux, these moments as poetic musicality that suddenly burst with dark or wonderful meaning, leaving us to imagine all the possible fates that are part of our everyday life. The animation and the sensitivity given to the characters caught in the traps of life are truly remarkable. A feast for the eyes and the senses.

Honourable Mention: Magic Atlas (dir. Xun Sun) 

Jury Comment: One film struck us in particular for its extraordinary craftsmanship. Made frame by frame with woodcut animation and ink painting, it has remarkable visual richness and texture.

Its unconventional narrative unfolds through layers of metaphor. It tells a political fable and it ends with a spiritual outlook. We admire the director’s courage in using animation to criticize dictatorship and other forms of authoritarian power.

Honourable Mention: Tangles (dir. Leah Nelson) 

Jury Comment: For its exploration of an experience that, while deeply personal to some, carries a universal resonance for us all. This film is about love, loss, and the enduring connections that shape our lives. Funny, heartfelt, and ultimately heartbreaking, the film stayed with us. We were blown away by its beautiful animation, emotional depth, and cinematic execution.

Public Prize 

Winner: Ball Face (dir. Laurence Thérien) 

Honourable Mention: როცა ზღვა იყო მშვიდი (When The Sea Was Calm) (dir. Mamuka Tkeshelashvili) 

Canada Media Fund Award for Best Canadian Animation 

Winner: La comète (The Comet) (dir. Julie Charette) 

Comment: For its understated, perceptive storytelling and its intelligent depiction of the sometimes painful processes of growing up.

Pour sa narration sobre et perspicace, ainsi que pour sa représentation intelligente des processus douloureux du passage à l’âge adulte.

Honourable Mention: Bisou Sauvage (dir. Bahij Jaroudi) 

Comment: For its arresting animation and its wicked, incisive sense of humour about modern times.

Pour son style d’animation saisissant et son humour caustique et incisif sur la société contemporaine.

Honourable Mention: Knowing Gaze (dir. Dylan Glynn) 

Comment: For its vibrant animation style and its witty take on complex contemporary issues of identity.

Pour son style d’animation dynamique et son approche pleine d’esprit des questions complexes liées à l’identité dans le monde d’aujourd’hui.

Hélène Tanguay Award for Humour 

Winner: Ball Face (dir. Laurence Thérien) 

Comment:There were many contenders, but few films made us laugh quite as much while repeatedly smashing a child in the face with a ball.

What begins as the familiar nightmare of school gym class becomes something wonderfully strange, funny and increasingly unhinged. The clay itself seems to take the beating along with its heroine—stretching, squashing and reshaping as she desperately tries to adapt, survive and somehow fit in.

And knowing Hélène, she would have been gifting the cinema with her big, boisterous laugh throughout Ball Face.

Best Animated Short

Winner: Eri (dir. Honami Yano) 

Jury Comment: For its living poetry of both images and words that depict a love that remains unmet, this film carries us through a lyrical pasture like wind through grass with thick painterly strokes.

Best Commissioned Animation 

Winner: Juana Molina ‘Desinhumano’ (Juana Molina ‘Uninhuman’) (dir. Dante Zaballa) 

Jury Comment: In a time of increasingly computer aided animation, we found this films use of deceptively simple handmade forms refreshingly joyful and tactile.

Bento Box Award for Best Student Animation

Winner: Ball Face (dir. Laurence Thérien)

Jury Comment: We were impressed by this films ability to take the embarrassment of youth and distill it into a mature, concise film that resonated beyond its initial comedic impression. 

Animation for Young Audiences 7+ Competition 

Winner: キャンディーカリエス (Candy Caries) (dir. Tomoki Misato) 

Honourable Mention: Bats & Bugs (dir. Lena von Döhren) 

Animation for Teen Audiences 13+ Competition 

Winner: Blue Flavored (dir. Jett Ulysses) 

Honourable Mention: La comète (The Comet) (dir. Julie Charette) 

Platform Animation Competition 

Winner: Adult Swim’s The Elephant (dirs. Pendleton Ward, Rebecca Sugar, Ian Jones-Quartey, Patrick McHale, Mike L. Mayfield, Humberto Irigoyen, Remus Buznea & Kyriaki Kyriakou) 

Comment: In the spirit of the anijam — or, more precisely, the old exquisite-corpse game — this three-part experiment brings together some of the defining voices in contemporary animation. Each team worked in isolation, with essentially no idea what the others were making, and somehow these wildly different pieces eventually had to become one film.

The result could easily have been a complete mess. Instead, it’s a bizarre, vivid and mysterious visual and narrative adventure — unpredictable from moment to moment, but never less than engaging.

Canadian Student Competition

Winner: Ball Face (dir. Laurence Thérien) 

Comment: This film captures the absurdity and anxiety of masking, adjusting and trying to fit in, with clay animation proving the perfect medium for a story about literally reshaping yourself to belong. Its bright, candy-coloured world gives the film a playful lightness, even as it moves between comedy and something quietly heartbreaking — that familiar memory of what we were willing to do during our school years just to fit in.

Honourable Mention: Expo Inferno (dir. A. John Yates)

Honourable Mention: Mortal Lace (dir. Lucas Piperias)

Best Script 

Winner: Uka-uka (dir. Henri Veermäe) 

Jury Comment: From the viewpoint of a child, this films complex arrangement of themes is presented with a tender yet cruel frankness that took us off guard. Its sudden turn showed us resiliency in difficult situations.

The Animation Guild Craft Award for Best Design 

Winner: როცა ზღვა იყო მშვიდი (When The Sea Was Calm) (dir. Mamuka Tkeshelashvili) 

Jury Comment: From this films first frame, we were taken into its rich character and setting design. Its mixture of bliss and horror was acutely felt through its impeccable design.

XPPen Craft Award for Best Animation Technique 

Winner: Daughters of the Late Colonel (dir. Elizabeth Hobbs) 

Jury Comment: This beautifully rendered, suggestive film impressed us with its economic use of mark making to create a vast space, open for the imagination to move freely in.

Best Sound Design 

Winner: Paper Trail (dir. Don Hertzfeldt) 

Jury Comment:This films claustrophobic symphony of tactile foley scratches, squeeks, scrapes and rubs, gave us pause to consider the inevitable inertia of shrinking into adulthood.