18/11/2025 - Also known as the European Animation Awards, the Emiles celebrated their return with a prizegiving ceremony spanning ten categories

Named after French animation pioneers Émile Reynaud and Émile Cohl, the Emile Awards – or, more formally, the European Animation Awards – have celebrated their 2025 edition, this year presented within the framework of the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn, Estonia. The awards began in 2017 but took a small break owing to the pandemic, returning this year as the fourth edition under the auspices of the European Animation Awards Association, created to celebrate “the importance and quality of European animation”.

Gints Zilbalodis’s Latvian Oscar and LUX Audience Award winner Flow [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Gints Zilbalodis
interview: Red Carpet @ European Film …
film profile] was the evening’s big winner, taking home Best Character Design and Backgrounds, Best Sound Design and Music (for sound mixer Mikko Raita), and Best of the Best in the Feature Films section. Pelikan Blue [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Laszló Csaki
film profile], the winner of Best Writing, made its way back to the Baltics after opening the Black Nights Critics’ Picks section two years ago. The animated Hungarian docufiction uses a combination of humour and recorded testimony to tell the story of three friends who concoct a way to forge international railway tickets in 1990s Hungary.

Based on a 1905 short story of the same name, Isabel Herguera’s Sultana's Dream [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Isabel Herguera
interview: Isabel Herguera
film profile] took home Best Animation. Each of the triptych’s parts uses a different creative technique, including shadow puppets and cut-outs, watercolour and mehndi, a South Asian method associated with henna dye. Telling the story of a Spanish artist in India, the film premiered at San Sebastián in 2023 and was crowned the winner of the Basque Film Award.

Several well-known shorts picked up the remaining gongs in the Short Film category. Nina Gantz’s Oscar-nominated, BAFTA-winning dark comedy Wander to Wonder secured Best Animation, while Izabela Plucińska’s Joko received Best Character Design and Backgrounds with its absurdist and arguably grotesque character styling. Anastasiia Falileieva’s I Died in Irpin, a partly hand-drawn documentary about the director and her then-partner fleeing Kyiv upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, won Best of the Best in the short-film section; the film had previously picked up the Best Animation Award at Clermont-Ferrand.

Here is the full list of this year’s award winners:

Feature Film Awards

Best Writing
Pelikan Blue [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Laszló Csaki
film profile] – László Csáki (Hungary)

Best Sound Design and Music
Mikko Raita - Flow [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Gints Zilbalodis
interview: Red Carpet @ European Film …
film profile] (Latvia/France/Belgium)

Best Character Design and Backgrounds
Flow – Gints Zilbalodis

Best Animation
Sultana’s Dream [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Isabel Herguera
interview: Isabel Herguera
film profile] – Isabel Herguera (Spain/Germany)

Best of the Best
Flow – Gints Zibalodis

Short Film Awards

Best Character Design and Backgrounds
Joko – Izabela Plucińska (Poland/Germany/Czech Republic)

Best Sound Design and Music
Michał Fojcik – Winter (Poland)

Best Animation
Kristien Vanden Busschek Steven De Beul, Rosanne Janssens, Sergio Lara Jimenez, Ben Tesseur, Soetkin Verstegen, Sandrine Gimenez – Wander to Wonder (Netherlands/Belgium/France/UK)

Best Student Film
Pear Garden – Shadab Shayegan (Germany)

Best of the Best
I Died in Irpin – Anastasiia Falileieva (Czech Republic/Slovakia/Ukraine)