Surreal bodies and antlered monsters as NFB films hit SIGGRAPH 2025’s cutting-edge Computer Animation Festival
NFB’s “Corpus and the Wandering” and “Inkwo for When the Starving Return” take a spotlight at international conference hosted in Vancouver
“Corpus and the Wandering”.
“Inkwo for When the Starving Return”.
A FEMALE FIGURE runs through a waving forest where the trees’ trunks and roots are arms and fingers, the “leaves” waving hair. In other scenes, a cloud—or is it a pulsing brain?—made up of knees and elbows forms above a sprinkling of wiggling toes, and a sunflower’s centre seethes with blinking eyes and squirming hands.
Artist Jo Roy’s “Corpus and the Wandering” is one of two remarkable NFB shorts chosen to show at SIGGRAPH 2025’s Computer Animation Festival. The major conference, hosted in Vancouver from August 10 to 14, focuses on cutting-edge computer graphics and interactive techniques. The animation fest starts on August 10 with a celebratory 30th anniversary of Toy Story, the film that kicked off the CG revolution.
And yet entries like “Corpus and the Wandering” are a world away from that of Woody and Buzz Lightyear. What makes the haunting, black-and-white, seven-minute work so dazzling is that Roy, a dancer and filmmaker, shot it with only an iPhone and her own body.
The artist manoeuvred fifty thousand iPhone video file layers into an innovative, gridlike “videomosaic” technique to conjure dreamlike, Dali-esque landscapes, roiling oceans, and spiralling universes. At moments, its echoing, multiple forms hark back meaningfully to Norman McLaren’s famous 1968 NFB short “Pas de Deux”.
The mesmerizing work, born out of pandemic isolation, becomes a deep self-portrait and a celebration of the infinite that lives within us—but also the endless power and potential of the female form, beyond crass objectification.
The director will be in attendance at its screenings on August 11 and 13.
Elsewhere at the conference’s animation fest, Vancouver-based Michif/Métis artist and animator Amanda Strong will talk about the creation of “Inkwo for When the Starving Return” at its screening on August 13. The NFB short blends beautifully crafted stop motion with cutting-edge technological touches: everything from VR previsualization to advanced Blender water simulations and a full HDR colour pipeline. The story centres on Dove, a gender-shifting Indigenous warrior. “Are you a boy or are you a girl?” a friendly toad asks the 2-Spirit character. “I’m both, toad,” they answer.
The richly hued animation is replete with beaded leather pieces, and Dove’s deep connection to nature is relayed through water rippling with lily pads and cattails, or waving grasses and foxglove. But Strong is equally adept at conjuring fearsome monsters—antlered, skeletal zombies that hunger for human flesh, awakened by humans’ industrial encroachment. 
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