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.)
According to production details shared ahead of Annecy, the film exists not just as animation but also as a series of oil paintings and orchestral performance elements tied directly to the score, which makes this even more intriguing.
Making the macabre magic
The scale of the painted material became central to the workflow. Around 75 oil paintings were produced over more than a decade and used as the visual foundation for scenes, rather than being treated as static concept art or background reference. Animation was then built on top of these surfaces, with teams working to maintain the uneven, textured quality of the paint rather than smoothing it into a conventional digital finish.
That approach required a distributed production setup. More than 30 artists across France, Hungary, Belgium, and the Netherlands worked on the film, with animation and compositing split among multiple studios, including Valk Productions, Autour de Minuit, and lead co-producer Cinemon Entertainment, which contributed 3D animation and visual effects. The workflow was deliberately iterative, with artists constantly correcting drift between frames and reintroducing imperfections when the image became too stable or uniform.
As detailed on Cartoon Brew, Hulsing also used a mix of live-action reference footage and digital tools to guide animation. Scenes were first blocked out using filmed performances, which were then translated into animated sequences layered over the painted environments. The goal was not rotoscoping, but maintaining believable motion while preserving the physical look of oil paint.
Did someone say AI?
Technically, the production used AI shader systems, trained on Hulsing’s own painted surfaces, to help match digital animation to the textures of the original canvases. Even so, even with this narrow use of a specific AI tool, the process still required extensive manual correction, with Hulsing and his team revisiting nearly every frame to maintain the paint-like quality. It’s the one aspect some could find issue with, but really, it’s fenced and used in moderation.
The result sits in a space between traditional hand-painted animation and a more experimental digital pipeline. While many recent painterly animated films prioritise clean motion and visual consistency, Danse Macabre is built around controlled instability, allowing edges, forms, and lighting to shift slightly from frame to frame. The film also originated from music rather than dialogue or a screenplay, which shapes its structure and tempo, with scenes built in response to the score, appearing and dissolving in rhythm with the composition rather than following linear storytelling.
After news that Pixar is creating its first non-3D movie, with a messier 2D approach, Danse Macabre is on-trend and definitely the animation short to watch this year; its mix of process, imagination, and new digital technology with traditional skill makes it one of a kind.
