Kaboom Animation Festival is a yearly event where animation professionals and fans meet, inspire each other and enjoy everything animation has to offer. Ranging from cutting-edge experimental arthouse to colorful stories for families and kids.
Not only does Kaboom celebrate animation in all its shapes and sizes, but they also celebrate the Dutch animation industry. Kaboom encourages auteurs to present the audience with their thought provoking art, design efforts and provocative experimentation.
Kaboom sees celebrating the Dutch animation industry as one of her core tasks. To inspire people and unite animators and creatives. That is why Kaboom organises the ‘Industry Day’ as an important part of the festival. There is an extended program with panels, showcases and presentations for students and young professionals from the animation industry.
In 2021, the theme of Kaboom Animation Festival is Big Bang! Like many festivals and cultural organizations, 2020 was a difficult year for Kaboom. They will come back in 2021 and they will do so with a (big) bang. Inspired by the idea of the big bang, Kaboom ’21 will screen film programs that ask questions about the beginning of the universe and life on Earth.
Kaboom ’21 will also go back to the “big bang” of animation: in a special program, the milestones of animation history will be shown, such as the first colored animation and the first animation with sound, including some rarely seen films.
Where 2020 was a turbulent year (political and cultural), Kaboom Animation Festival also explicitly sees instability as a breeding ground for new culture and new ways of thinking. As in the rest of the festival programming, Kaboom connects the theme program specifically social developments, with a strong focus on how recent developments such as the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and the protests of Black Lives Matter can be seen in the animation industry.
Kaboom Animation Festival had its first edition in 2019, as a merge between KLIK Amsterdam Animation Festival and Holland Animation Film Festival (HAFF).
After eleven years of co-existing, KLIK and HAFF joined forces, used differences to complement each other: they merged into a brand new animation festival that combines the best of both worlds… Kaboom Animation Festival.
