The latest edition of Cartoons on the Bay, the international animation and children’s television festival organized by Rai Com, will take place in Turin from 12th to 14th April.
“For the second year” says Roberto Nepote, president of Rai Com, “Turin will become the capital of animation, transforming itself into a laboratory that is attentive to the technological, stylistic and thematic evolution of this artistic genre which is undergoing a strong development on a worldwide scale”.

Virtual reality is the latest IT technology of great interest to the vast world of animation and videogames. And VR Cartoons appears among the nine Pulcinella Award categories this year, “visual reality works realized using any animation technique that can be used with any device and visor”.
“Space Dog”, the adaptation of the internationally homonym successful French videogame, on which a cartoon has been based that is currently on the Rai Gulp channel (and also in competition for the best kids’ series, one of the 10 Rai productions featured), is among the titles selected for this new section, with an 8 minutes short produced by the innovative Turin digital animation studio Animoka in collaboration with Rai Ragazzi that in Palazzo Carignano, the headquarters of the festival as well as a Unesco World Heritage Site, will offer workstations for experiencing Virtual Reality in person and test the state of the art of this technology with enormous potential.
The Jury includes two professionals from the games industry: the Canadian entrepreneur Jason Della Rocca, former executive of the IGDA, the International Game Developers Association, and the American Jordan Weisman, famous game designer and VR pioneer, the protagonist of one of the Master classes offered by the festival.
The Studio of the year award will go to a company that publishes and develops video games, Ubisoft Montreal (Canada is also the guest country).

The fringe initiatives include one by the Film Commission Torino Piedmont in support of the animation sector, but not just the part that is already structured.
The festival is an occasion for organizing routes for bringing ten selected heterogeneous entities closer to the “Rai world”, such as graphics/communication studios in the first stages of realizing animated content, former students from the animation department of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Turin gathered together in associations or cooperatives, producers that alternate drama and animation works, companies specializing in new technologies.