ACM SIGGRAPH announced the Computer Animation Festival’s Best Animated Short and Jury Honors winners for SIGGRAPH 2004.
The winners are:

Birthday Boy (Best Animated Short)
Director: Sejong Park
Producer: Australian Film, Television and Radio School

The scene is Korea in 1951. It is little Manuk’s birthday, and he is playing on the village streets, imagining his father’s daily life as a soldier at the frontlines. After playing, Manuk returns home to find a recently delivered parcel. Thinking it is a present for him, Manuk opens the parcel — and its contents change his life forever.

Ryan (Jury Honors)
Director: Chris Landreth
Producer: Independent

Ryan was produced by Copper Heart Entertainment in co-production with the National Film Board of Canada in association with Seneca College Animation Arts Centre. Ryan hovers between animation and documentary, and defies easy definition. It is based on the life of Ryan Larkin, a former animator who produced some of the most influential animated films of his time 30 years ago at the National Film Board of Canada. Today, Larkin lives on welfare and panhandles for spare change in Montreal. How could such an artistic genius follow this path? In Ryan, we hear the voices of Larkin and people who knew him as an animator. These voices speak through bizarre, humorous, twisted, disturbing, or disembodied 3D-generated characters. The distorted appearances reflect Landreth’s personal world of “psychological realism”. A world encapsulated in the words of Anais Nin: “We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are”.