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I think that's were Tulip tries to push sg in a rather uncommon direction in the field of animation-festival-circuit.

With Tulip I am split between two types of festivals; the animator's one and the feature filmmaker's one. This is not new to me because in the past my films were also invited to the documentary festivals.

I prefer the audiences of the non-animation festivals because they tend to be made of people who are simply interested in seeing good films that are often very, very good but never make it to the theaters because buyers don't understand audiences. Buyers are like animation festival organizers -- they are after ticket sales and have bought into their self inflicted myth that only mediocre audiences go to the movies and only mediocre animators attend animation festivals. Mediocrity wins these days but live action film festival audiences still have a larger percentage of culturally mature audiences because that's where those festivals sell more tickets. For some reason, most animation festivals have decided that a large pick of too intellectually demanding films will cause them to lose their hoards of mediocre attendees.

The audience reactions and post festival reviews I got from Annecy compared to Toronto have been so diametrically in contrast with each other that one might think that two separate films were entered under the same name. After these experiences I am beginning to worry that the animation festivals are not delivering their mandate, which is to offer diversity and the support of new courageous thinking and trends.

For crying out loud, I get many questions during the Q&A post screening periods at live action festivals about the software and techniques we used in the making of Tulip, compared to NO Q & A period at Annecy... an absolute disgrace! The reasoning from festival organizers? We would have to present fewer films because Q&A's take up too much time. So the poor animator/director never receives direct audience feedback anymore, the attending festival viewers never get to learn anything directly from the animators who make the films, but the festival GETS TO MAKE MORE MONEY. You don't have that attitude at the live action festivals -- but you do get it in the theaters, where the interesting, very, very good films don't make it because the shortsighted distributors have long ago chased the mature audiences away. That's where they want the hoards of mediocrity to show up -- the same people who were at the animation festivals last week.