By Hou Jialiang and Wang Chenyan
The official website of the Atlanta Film Festival (ATLFF) recently announced that Bon Appétit, a student work from the School of Animation and Digital Arts at the Communication University of China, was selected for the Animated Shorts competition from more than 5,500 entries worldwide and will compete for the festival’s final award.
Bon AppétitSelected for ATLFF 2026.
The four-minute production was created by Wang Ziyu and Yu Jinhong, Animation majors from Class of 2021, under the joint supervision of Associate Professor Liu Dayu and Professor Gao Weihua.
Exploring themes of symbiosis and interdependence in intimate relationships, the surrealist animated short uses a sheep and a flower as symbolic representations of masculinity and femininity, telling the story of a grass-eating sheep in a garden that becomes fascinated by a distinctive purple flower and, after consuming it, is in turn absorbed by the flower itself before ultimately merging into the garden as part of a shared existence.
Bon Appétit Film Poster.
Prior to its ATLFF selection, Bon Appétit had already been chosen for competition at several notable festivals in 2025, including Animafest Zagreb in Croatia, Kaboom Animation Festival in the Netherlands, Sofia International Animation Film Festival in Bulgaria and Fantasia International Film Festival in Canada.
Founded in 1976, the ATLFF is one of the largest and longest-running film festivals in America and is accredited by both the Academy Awards and the Canadian Screen Awards. The 2026 edition is scheduled to run from April 23 to May 3 in Atlanta, the capital of the U.S. state of Georgia.
Original manuscript link：https://www.cuc.edu.cn/news/2026/0416/c1901a269061/page.htm
Editor: Li Shuxuan, Fang Yiran
Managing Editor: Wang Chenyan
Editor-in-chief: Yu Ran, Yang Zhongtian
