9th Annual Kingston Canadian Film Festival, Feb25th to Mar1, 2009. Kids animation workshop, and: Vampiro!

Saw that this event is coming up.
It's a new one for me and seems to be geared towards live-action. Nice to see, though, that the NFB is doing a kids animation workshop. Question: Do they do animation workshops for adult too? Animation is pretty tricky. I know a lot of adults who work pretty hard to make some of their own. Why are these workshops always for kids? Do medical symposiums have brain surgery workshops for kids? Is that analogy accurate?
When looking at the profile given to animation in this festival, it's easy to see how we're perceived. The film festival is for "serious" live action features. They show off locally-produced short films (also live-action) before the feature screenings, which is an idea I LURVE, by the way. And for the kids... and animation workshop.
Now, I have a 7 year-old daughter. I have a couple neices and nephews, and have a lot of kids around in general. Know what the favourite gift for more than a few of these kids was this year? Digital video cameras.
These kids love making movies!
Kids.
Making LIVE ACTION movies.
They are largely hilarious and terrible.
But they love making them. None of these kids were begging their parents for lightboxes, Harmony software or even flipbooks. Live action is immediate. Kids point and shoot and get to laugh at themselves. Animation is deliberate, precise, and time consuming. But it's a "kid's medium". Welcome to the continued sidelining of the medium.
But we do it to ourselves too. We have our own festivals, which I love. But why is this? Don't our films stack up against our live-action counterparts? How many of you out there submit your films to live-action festivals? Better representation in the entries might lead to better representation in the categories, and perhaps, better representation in the winner's circle.
Yes, submit your films to the Ottawa Festival. Submit them to animation festivals everywhere! If you an afford it. But throw your name into other arenas too.
Upon close inspection, there does appear to be some form of drawn imagery in at least one of the films in the shorts package. So some one made some animation "serious" enough for real filmgoers to watch less than 12 minutes of it.

If you are in Kingston during these dates though, go see Vampiro! I caught a screening here in Ottawa a while back and this movie absolutley ruined the Wrestler for me.