Watch This: Gobelins Annecy Japan Shorts

The Annecy International Animation Festival took place earlier this month, and the 2019 country focus was Japan. To commemorate the occasion, students from Paris's world-renowned Gobelins animation school to create a series of shorts to be shown as introductions daily throughout the festival.

The five shorts have since been shared by Gobelins through their YouTube page- and their all fantastic pieces of work. Each is designed to highlight an individual aspect of Japanese culture- food, film, music, and so on, as well as karaoke and kaiju.

Despite the fact that each video runs under a minute, they're packed with little references and easter eggs for Japanophiles to spot. Look out for an appearance from a certain, well-known and dearly departed animation director- and his better known, still living studio colleague! The videos employ a variety of styles, but interestingly stay away- for the most part- from the obvious classic anime style. Making of videos are also being uploaded (but are not all yet available as of publication).

At this year's festival it was announced that Gobelins were partnering with Netflix to offer one graduate a year a place at Netflix's anime studio in Tokyo.