Apr 7, 2018

The first Quirino Award winner will be announced tonight.

After two jam-packed days of presentations, meetings, networking sessions, and parties, the first annual Quirino Awards will climax tonight with the main attraction, the Quirino Awards Show.

The Quirino Awards represent 23 Ibero-American countries from Latin America and Europe, and this week's event was attended by key industry figures from most countries. A total of 24 films from nine Ibero-American countries have been nominated for the nine Quirino Awards. The nominees were chosen from a total of 273 submissions.

If there was one takeaway from the past few days, it is that the Ibero-American animation industry is expanding at an unprecedented pace. The animation industry in the region is more connected than ever, and events like Quirinos are helping to further cement that connection. Given that many countries are still in the early stages of animation industry development, the greatest growth is yet to come. The Quirino Awards itself will receive more entries and launch new categories in the future to fully represent the region's diverse output.

But first - the Quirino Awards will be presented this evening at the Auditorio Adan Martín on the Spanish island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Here is a look at the nominees in the three main categories of the Quirino Awards:

Three of the feature films are CG, with the Spanish feature "Tad, the Lost Explorer and the Secret of King Midas" leading the Quirino Awards with a total of three nominations. The other nominees are in the Animation Design and Sound Design/Original Music categories, where Tad is the fifth-highest grossing film released in Spain last year, ahead of American films such as Coco, The Fate of the Furious, and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. It was the fifth highest grossing film released in Spain last year, beating out American films such as "Coco," "The Fate of the Furious," and "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle," and also won Spain's Goya Award for Best Animated Feature. Another Mexican film, Ana y Bruno, was directed by Academy Award nominee Carlos Carrera. He is best known for his live action features, but has also worked in animation throughout his career. Carrera's film was the closing night film at last fall's Morelia International Film Festival and will be released theatrically in Mexico this August. Lila's Book, her only 2D film, is the 12th Colombian feature film, but the first directed by a woman in the country.

Series films use a mixture of techniques, including CG (the long-running Spanish series "Pocoyo"), stop motion (Argentina's "The Tiniest Man in the World"), and hand-drawn (the Colombian-originated "Old Folks Tales"). Zumbastico Studios' [Chile] "Paper Port" uses an innovative mix of stop-motion with 3-D paper cut-outs and digital 2-D. [The Ecuadorian-led "Afterwork" was created using CG (with hand-drawn insertions), Mexico's "Cerulia" was created using stop motion, and Spain's "Decorado" was created using hand-drawn animation. All three films have been successful at festivals, with "Decorado" winning the Goya Award for Best Spanish Short in 2017. Cerulia, which has a very distinctive look, was also nominated for a second Quirino Award for Best Animated Design."