2D & 3D Animation Film Festival

An international animation festival in the heart of Irpinia

The 2D & 3D Animation Film Festival is one of the most original events in Campania: an international competition entirely dedicated to animated short films, hosted annually at the Multisala Cinema Nuovo in Lioni, a town in the upper Ofanto valley in the province of Avellino. The festival was launched in June 2020 from an idea by director Giuseppe Rossi and has grown rapidly: by its first edition, it had already received over a thousand entries from 79 countries, including productions from Oscar-nominated schools.

The organization is managed by the Rotary and Rotaract Club Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi Hirpinia Goleto, in collaboration with the Municipality of Lioni: a volunteer-based structure that has allowed the festival to maintain its most popular feature over the years—free admission until all seats are filled.

The three competition categories

The regulations categorize works based on their production technique, making the diverse creative landscape accessible to the public:

• 2D & 3D Animation — hybrid shorts, where hand-drawn art is integrated with three-dimensional environments and effects;
• 2D Animation — traditional animation drawn frame by frame;
• 3D Animation — entirely digital works created with the most advanced computer graphics software.

These are accompanied by a long list of technical and artistic awards—Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Character Animation, Character Design, Voice Acting, Editing, Cinematography, Production Design, Original Soundtrack, Visual and Sound Effects—in addition to the Audience Award and the Rotaract Award. A specific section is reserved for student works, the festival's true reservoir of talent.

Schools and academies from around the world

The official selection features names from the most prestigious international animation schools: Gobelins and ArtFX in France, CalArts, Ringling College of Art and Design, and the University of California in the United States, as well as Esma and the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Germany. Italy is represented by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia of Turin, the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples, and the BigRock School. For a small town in the Campanian Apennines, this is an achievement with few parallels.

A day for young people, schools, and families

The festival is concentrated into a single day of screenings, interspersed with in-depth sessions on animation techniques and meetings with directors present in the theater. The selected shorts often address social and environmental issues—pollution, illness, adoption, diversity—told through a language accessible even to children. It is no coincidence that the event has become a staple for local schools and families in upper Irpinia over the years.

Lioni and the upper Ofanto valley

Lioni is a town of about six thousand inhabitants in the Province of Avellino, in Campania, rebuilt after the 1980 Irpinia earthquake and now a reference point for services in the upper Ofanto valley. The Multisala Cinema Nuovo, overlooking Piazza Vittorio Emanuele III, is one of the few active cinemas in the inland area: bringing an international competition here every spring means restoring cultural centrality to a territory often considered peripheral. Visitors from outside the area can combine their trip with visits to nearby villages—Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi with the Goleto Abbey, Nusco, Calitri—and enjoy Irpinian cuisine, featuring Podolico caciocavallo cheese, chestnuts, and Taurasi wines.