Alice Macanga is a Story Artist and 2D Animator who uses her mediums to tell complex stories about individuals struggling with their identity, fate, and purpose. Using a blend of comedy and adult drama, Alice's films bring about a sense of homelike comfort with dark undertones and an introspective touch.
From a young age, Alice got into the habit of stealing her family's camera to bring her toys to life through stop-motion animations. As her teenage years came around, Alice enrolled as an animation student at The Private Secondary Art School of Animation (SŠUPAT) in Slovakia. During her studies, Alice worked as a colorist on the animated edutainment show 5coin (5peniažok) and created her biggest project to date, an animated short titled Remorse, which earned her the Audience Award at Animofest 2024. Later that year, Alice moved to the United States and enrolled at Virginia Tech as a Creative Technologies major. There, Alice worked as the Immersive Motion Artist on The Nikki Giovanni Immersive Experience, helping conceptualize special effects in Adobe After Effects and Blender.
Currently, Alice is in her junior year. Growing her showrunning skills, working towards her next big animated short and running The Animation Club.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Since early age, I've been obsessed with themes of identity, fate, and purpose. So it's only natural that they would take over my creative work as well. Whether told through 2D animation or storyboard, everything in my stories becomes malleable in the pursuit of this desire. The inner worlds of my characters leak out of their minds to take visual form as abstracted phantom stalkers or whales swimming in the skies above.
Though my style is quite fluid, viewers will find heavy inspiration from experimental electronic music, such as Yashar Tafazoli's Eleventh Hour album, the watercolor aesthetic of Sui Ishida, and the emotional animation of Arcane.
Utilizing the plasticity of the 2D animation medium, I exaggerate my character's faces, teetering on the edge of naturalism, with their bodies serving as readable reflections of their inner multitudes: those of the story they hold and the actors who tell it. The worlds they inhabit range from the painfully mundane to surreal, high-concept fantasy landscapes, used to either contrast, blend with, or minimize the complex struggles I discuss through my protagonists. It is through these techniques that I lead a discussion with the viewer, holding up a mirror to their own inner multitude and to those of others.
My goal is to spark feelings within my audience, to make them feel the same joys and dreads as my characters do. I want them to question whether they themselves contain those same colors and shapes that I depict, to find themselves within the stories I tell through my hand-drawn frames.