© Cardiff Animation Festival - Magic Lantern Cinema
From travelling across Wales with The Princess and the Goblin, to regular family-friendly films at Oasis Cardiff, and monthly Cardiff Animation Nights both online and in-person, there have been many ways for people to enjoy animation.
Read their case study:
One of our core aims of the year round programme was to build on our successful outreach work with Oasis Cardiff, bringing animation screenings to asylum seeker and refugee families year-round at Oasis. We wanted to engage more families than ever and successfully increase a sense of belonging to the wider festival community amongst this group. A big indicator of success is whether Oasis families choose to attend the annual festival outside of the events we deliver in Splott.
We also wanted to develop our relationship with rural venues, platforming Welsh animation heritage with a Welsh language feature, The Princess and the Goblin with added value activity such as Q&As and creative workshops. We commissioned the first ever English language subtitles for the Welsh language version of the film as part of our aim to increase visibility of the language in relation to Welsh animation history. Continuing to serve our young audience (aged 16-30) and reach new young audiences and families remains an important aim for CAF – we wanted to attract more of these audiences in 2025-26
C
ardiff Animation Nights screens 8 to 12 independent animated shorts every month either online live on YouTube or in-person at The Underdog in Cardiff city centre. This resulted in screening over 200 independent short films from Welsh and international artists across the project.For CAF on Tour the 1991 classic feature film The Princess and the Goblin was screened at 14 venues across Wales (see image below).
Family-friendly screenings at Oasis Cardiff included a variety of animated feature films such as Moana 2, The Wild Robot, Despicable Me 4, Encanto, Elemental, Abominable and Flow.
We are incredibly proud of all of our events, but there were two stand outs in this period of our work. The work we have done for several years with Oasis Cardiff has grown tremendously, bringing a diverse audience to regular screenings, and this year we were able to translate that into bringing many asylum seeker and refugee families to CAF26 events at Chapter. Seeing how much Oasis families enjoyed being part of the wider festival, watching new films for the first time and participating in model-making workshops together with Aardman was a real highlight and showed us the value of this year-round work in building sense of belonging and confidence amongst this community.
It was also very important for us to be able to revive The Princess and the Goblin for modern audiences, including many Welsh-speaking families, bringing it to the big screen across Wales after decades of it being available exclusively for home viewing on VHS.
The work of acquiring the film, working with S4C’s archive and the filmmakers at Calon, and making new English subtitles to accompany the Cymraeg dialogue really paid off. This helped us increase the accessibility of the film in Cymraeg to English speaking audiences and learners whilst sharing the wealth of original artwork and animation cels. Throughout the tour we heard so many beautiful stories from audience members who had different lifelong connections to the film.
The most challenging part of the year round project was identifying the rights holders for the Cymraeg and English versions of The Princess and the Goblin, and discovering where we could source a copy of the film for our screenings. We persisted and reached out to several different organisations and companies in Wales.
The funding we received enabled us to showcase independent animated shorts and classic Welsh films which would otherwise be unavailable to view without travelling to a festival or having special access to archive material. We choose films from all over the world that audiences in Wales may not usually encounter, as well as films that platform Welsh language and culture.
We had a lot of feedback from families who were excited that a Welsh language animated feature film was being shown in the cinema, and gave us suggestions for future titles that they would like to see at future screenings. This has led to our new tour for 2026/2027 of Yr Injan Fach Fentrus and Sion Blewyn Coch, building on the success of The Princess and the Goblin to bring these animated children’s classics to cinemas across the country.
At Oasis Cardiff, our audiences have consistently been very excited to watch films together, there was a lot of lovely feedback from the parents following their time at CAF26 and we’re excited to build on this partnership for 2026/27.
“I’ve never seen a Welsh animation (before)…” – CAF audience member
The project gave communities a chance to gather around an accessible artform that provides great discussion points, enjoyment, sparks imagination and provides an inclusive experience. This strengthens the bond between communities, reduces loneliness and hopefully inspires people to be creative themselves and perhaps even enter the industry in the future. We know that many of our rural audiences rarely attend the cinema and many are completely new to CAF events, suggesting that there is a unique pull to animation events that brings people to arts and cultural experiences who might not usually attend. Animation is much less platformed in the areas of Wales we cover within our tour.
Over the course of this programme we have learned that often building important audiences from harder to reach communities has to happen through consistency, inclusivity, access and sense of ownership. By working with partners such as venues and the Oasis Cardiff team, we have learned that organic community growth and audience development comes from reliably delivering relevant events, listening carefully to what audiences want and ensuring access is as tailored to those community group needs as possible. We hope to apply this to our audience development plans in future, and are incredibly grateful for Film Hub Wales’ continued support that enables us to develop a trusted position with harder to reach audiences and reach more deeply into our local communities.
