Tangles Wins Grand Jury Prize at Animation Is Film Festival

Leah Nelson's animated feature Tangles has won the Grand Jury Prize at the 9th annual Animation Is Film Festival, Variety reported. The festival ran October 16 to 19, 2026, in Los Angeles.

Tangles is a 2-D animated film. That means its images are flat drawings rather than 3-D computer models. It follows a family as the mother lives with dementia, a condition that gradually affects memory and thinking. The film is based on the graphic novel by Sarah Leavitt.

The festival's schedule listed Tangles as a Competition Feature, a film entered in the main contest for longer works. It screened on October 17 at 5:30 p.m. Pacific time in TCL 1, one of the festival's theatres. Earlier this month, the Vancouver International Film Festival presented Nelson with a Luminary Award for the film.

The other winners were spread across the programme. Iron Boy, directed by Louis Clichy, took the Fumi Kitahara Special Jury Prize and the Features Audience Award, the prize voted on by audience members. In the short films, Don Hertzfeldt's Paper Trail won the Shorts Jury Grand Prize, and Anna Mantzaris's Please took the Shorts Special Jury Prize.

The Grand Jury Prize has a history at this event. Last year's edition, the 8th, gave the same award to Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, according to Variety's 2025 coverage.

For a festival built around animation, the awards show how wide the form can reach. Short films, feature films and audience votes all picked different winners, and each category had its own jury or voting process. A festival prize rarely sends a film straight to cinemas or streaming. It does put the title in front of programmers, critics and buyers who decide what people see next.

The festival's full list of winners is available on its website. Nelson's film, which started as a graphic novel and became a 2-D animated feature, now carries the festival's top jury honour into the next stage of its life.