Cartoons Underground is betting its 15th edition on the next generation

Cartoons Underground began with an observation about where animation came from. In 2012 Vicky Chen, then 21, saw an industry whose focus was unbalanced toward animated films from outside Asia. With Patrick Smith, who had spent his formative years as a storyboard artist for Walt Disney and an animation director for MTV, she started a festival in Singapore to uncover and showcase animated stories from Asia.

Watch the Cartoons Underground 2026 trailer: youtube.com/watch?v=TEV2-CeBSlc

Fifteen editions on, it describes itself as Southeast Asia’s longest-standing independent animation festival. It has screened work by Bill Plympton, Dahee Jeong and Low Ser En, Singapore’s first female BAFTA winner, and has drawn more than 1,000 people every year. On Saturday 14 November it returns to Filmhouse on Beach Road with 28 short films from 17 countries, and with a new answer to the question of who its audience should be.

01 — The whyWhere a career finds its first audience

The festival’s argument is about beginnings. “Everyone has to start somewhere,” Chen wrote in this year’s invitations. “Behind every award-winning filmmaker was once a young creative with a story to tell, looking for an opportunity to be seen.” Cartoons Underground was built for that moment: through workshops, mentorship and networking, it gives emerging filmmakers a platform to connect with audiences and the international animation community.

Its recent record makes the case. Last year it hosted a behind-the-scenes session with Ervin Han on The Violinist. The feature film went on to win the prestigious Cristal Award at Annecy. “It’s wonderful to see Singaporean animation getting the international spotlight it deserves,” Chen says. In June the festival brought Minions director Kyle Balda to talk about his creative journey. The education link is formal: LASALLE College of the Arts is the festival’s education partner, and Chris Shaw, head of its Puttnam School of Film & Animation, calls Cartoons Underground “a fertile training ground and a great springboard for our students to showcase their work.”

There is a sharper edge to the mission this year. “The more we’re bombarded with soulless AI-generated content the more we’ll crave art that’s truly human,” Chen says. Every film in the line-up, she argues, is “the product of experience, imagination and the desire to connect.”

02 — The workAnxiety, war and an otter facing eviction

The 28 films span stop-motion, hand-drawn 2D and experimental work. Programme Director Jerrold Chong, whose own films have screened at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Busan and Annecy, sees a pattern: many explore the pressures of living in one’s own head. A people-pleaser collapses and faces a dark being. A mouse dreads going outside. A rabbit is consumed by the choice he lost. Others look outward. I Am Fine, by Osi Wald, a senior lecturer at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy and a key animator on Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, is an animated diary kept through years of war. In Five Orphans, by Japanese director Sarina Nihei, five orphans walk along a ditch as protests rise around them.

Memory, loss and mortality run through others. A man has a hole in his neck and cannot remember how it got there; a sculptor looks back on his life after death; an ageing shop owner faces his end with the help of a moth. A Pint of Bitter comes from Irish animator Conor Kehelly, the festival’s 2023 winner, who writes, directs, animates, scores and voices his entirely self-funded films.

Singapore has a stake too. For the first time, a film by an overseas Singaporean sits in the international competition: Drive On, Mr Otter!, by CalArts graduate Fong Chun Kit, in which a timid otter gets a last chance to evict an elderly couple or risk losing his own home. The student selection includes Everything’s Peachy, the first stop-motion film by recent LASALLE graduate Nah Yee Chern, which was also selected for the Singapore International Film Festival.

Each one is a reflection of its maker, a story direct from them to us.

03 — The new audienceWhy the festival is letting children in

The biggest change this year starts at 1.30pm. Playground is the festival’s first programme made for younger audiences: eight shorts suitable for all ages. Chong describes them as looking at the world through a child’s eyes, with curiosity, wonder and a sense of difference. In Over Yonder, by neurodivergent filmmaker Rachel James Carrière from rural Canada, the longing is to fly and to belong. In Silence, by Korean director Yoona Hwang, a deaf child enjoys a concert through vibration and a hearing aid. In I am Akiko, a girl sees snow differently from everyone in her art class.

The films are by first-time directors and student collectives, and the logic is long-term. A festival that has spent fifteen editions giving young animators their first audience is now trying to reach them earlier, as an audience.

04 — What to expectThree screenings, one Saturday

Playground opens the day at 1.30pm. Held Breath follows at 4.30pm with bold, thought-provoking independent shorts. Rip Tides starts at 7pm and closes the night with the Golden Durian Awards, where the audience votes for its favourite film, a live animation and music performance, and a Q&A with the directors. The festival recommends the evening screening as a great opportunity to meet the filmmakers.

Filmhouse is at Golden Mile Tower, 6001 Beach Road, #05-00. Tickets are sold per programme at filmhouse.sg/seasons-events/cu2026, and anyone with tickets for two or more programmes can collect one-of-a-kind CU merch at Filmhouse on the day with proof of purchase. The full line-up is at cartoonsunderground.com/program-list-2026. Three questions, answered in the festival team’s own published words:

What do this year’s films have in common?

Jerrold Chong, Programme Director: “Many of this year’s films explore the pressures of living in one’s own head. Anxiety, guilt and fear of judgement are met with humour, unease and a dose of the surreal. Others look outward and bear witness to an unstable world.”

How do the Singapore student films measure up?

Jerrold Chong: “Their films reach past the local and familiar for the universal. Intimate in scale and bold in ambition, these films hold their own beside the international selection.”

Why open the festival to children now?

Jerrold Chong: “From its inception Cartoons Underground has aimed to make space for upcoming Singaporean animators. Now, by opening the festival to children for the first time I’d like to think that by spreading its love of indie animation it’ll captivate young fans who maybe will be my future students and making films themselves five or ten years from now.”

Cartoons Underground is on GigDay as an animation festival. Its trailer is below. Fifteen editions in, the bet is the same as it was in 2012: give original, human work a screen and an audience, and the next generation will turn up to make more of it.