Every year, one animation showing at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival breaks out and captures everyone’s imagination; in 2024, it was Blender-made Flow. This year it’s likely to be Hisko Hulsing’s Danse Macabre, an animated short built from around 75 oil paintings, created across multiple countries with more than 30 artists involved, and taking 11 years to make. It’s sure to be one of Annecy 2026’s more technically unusual projects.
Rather than starting with a traditional script, the film grew out of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, and as detailed on the artist's website, Hulsing began by listening to the music and building storyboards and visual sequences around its structure, so the animation follows the rhythm of the score rather than conventional narrative beats. From there, the project expanded into a unique and complex hybrid pipeline combining hand-painted oil backgrounds, digital animation, and custom shader systems designed to preserve the texture of the original paintings. (Read our oil painting tutorial for advice.)
