Free puppetry displays in Edinburgh announced as Manipulate Arts Festival reveals full programme for February 2026

Manipulate Arts announces the full programme and free City-Wide pop-up performances for all of Edinburgh from Wednesday 4 to Tuesday 10 February 2026. Find out more below.

Ocho the Octopus. Photo credit: Tim Davies

What's On at Manipulate Arts Festival 2026

Manipulate Arts - Scotland’s home for cutting-edge animation, puppetry and visual theatre - today announces the final elements of its 2026 Festival programme, including a series of free pop-up performances for all Edinburgh residents to enjoy, and the final Feature in their Animation strand - Memoir of a Snail.

Manipulate Award for Scottish Animation

For the first time this year, Manipulate Arts will present the Manipulate Award for Scottish Animation, in partnership with Move Summit and Glasgow Film. This new award will recognise excellence in independent Scottish animation, celebrating the grassroots creativity and innovation that define our nation. Presented biennially, the award highlights the importance of celebrating homegrown talent, and Manipulate Arts’ key role in the animation community.

A distinguished panel of Scottish animation and film professionals make up the jury, including representatives from Move Summit, Glasgow Film, Clanimation, and Animation Scotland, alongside Manipulate Arts. The winner of the award will be announced at MOVE Summit in the week commencing 16 February.

Ocho the Octopus pops up!

Innovative sculptor Tim Davies Design’s immense, illuminated octopus puppet Ocho will make its way around Edinburgh in a series of pop-up performances. Bringing playfulness and light to the February skies, and celebrating Edinburgh’s position as a coastal city, Ocho will pop up at the National Museum of Scotland on Saturday 7 February, free to witness for all Edinburgh residents and visitors. The octopus will then make his way down the Royal Mile to Parliament Square, lighting up the city streets and inviting all to join him on his journey.

Ocho the Octopus will be joined on parade with a series of inflatable puppets created by young people in Wester Hailes, who have been working with Scottish artists Ronan McMahon and Gretchen Maynard-Hahn to develop their own creations, in partnership with WHALE ARTS.

On Friday 6 February, Ocho and his new friends will parade through Wester Hailes, starting off at Westside Centre Shopping Centre, for a local celebration of the young people’s work.

On Sunday 8 February, audiences can return to the National Museum of Scotland for a series of four vignettes from Bruno Gallagher’s Europe, Meine Leibe, Mon Amour which will be performed throughout the day. Inspired by memories and dreams of travels across Europe, each vignette is a journey of imagination accompanied by abstract soundscapes and elements of live and recorded music that plays with object manipulation, mask play, costume, altered movement and dance.

In partnership with Lyra, Scotland’s first theatre for children and teenagers, the work will also appear for free at Artspace in Craigmillar before its pop-up at NMS to reach a wider Edinburgh audience with mesmerising, completely free visual theatre.

Dawn Taylor, Artistic Director and CEO of Manipulate Arts, said:

"We are really excited to be bringing a bit of the unexpected to Edinburgh's streets and public spaces this February with extraordinary puppetry and performance which will be free for everyone in the city to enjoy. It's been particularly special to develop our marine puppetry project in partnership with young people from Wester Hailes and WHALE Arts to celebrate Edinburgh's identity as a coastal city, around the centrepiece of Tim Davies' awesome 7-metre Ocho puppet.

We're thrilled also today to announce the full lineup of shorts and features for our film programme, which includes work by filmmakers from 15 countries, and has a special focus on Scotland with our inaugural award for Scottish animators, bringing our celebration of Edinburgh and Scotland beyond to the screen as well as the streets."

Memoir of a Snail, Grace Pudel

Manipulate Arts Festival - Animation

In animation, joining the previously announced double bill of It’s Such a Beautiful Day + ME, Adam Smith’s Oscar-nominated Memoir of a Snail completes the animated features programme. Telling the bittersweet tale of Grace Pudel (voiced by Sarah Snook), who learns through the telling of her autobiography that the worst cages are the ones that we create for ourselves, this darkly funny stop-motion animation charts loss, grief and mental health and finding your way out of your shell.

Competing for the Festival’s first-ever Scottish Animation Award - the Manipulate Award for Scottish Animation - 10 of the best Scottish animators will showcase their work.

Distance to the Moon explores the immense power of the cosmos; Making Mountains from Sammi Duong navigates the chaos of the anxious mind; Wilma Smith’s The Jubilee explores the clouded memories of dementia; Veni Vidi Non Vici from Lenor Calaça exposes the brutality of Portuguese bullfighting; Porkhampton from Louis Managh is a remembered portrait of a hometown; Roni Niu’s Room Temperature follows in inquisitive White humanoid into the technicolour unknown; Samson Orr’s Growin’ Pains escapes into a magical world as a relief from conflict; Fairground Fever by Linda Hughes visits the Links Market in Kircaldy; Creche and Burn from Frank O’Neil enters the zombie apocalypse; and Ana Songel’s Peace of Heart creates a dreamlike, family-woven island tale.

Peace of Heart film

In further Shorts, the Animated Documentary Shorts programme will feature eight titles from across the globe, covering parental loss; shame; the US prison system; school uniform conventions; bullfighting practices; a day in Ukraine; a criminal swan; and the lifecycle of a goose barnacle.

Animated Horror Shorts from the UK, USA, Taiwan, Chile, Ukraine and France will terrify audiences with bad first dates and nightmare romances; a mutant praying mantis; surreal dreams of celebrity; nighttime in the suburbs; a mysterious rabbit; a living sculpture and the official music video for Eluvium’s Regenerative Being.

All of the Festival’s shorts programmes will be available for audiences to watch online, from the comfort of their own homes, for 48 hours over the final weekend of the festival.

Finally, the much-loved One Bum Cinema Club will showcase a range of all-ages Scottish and international short animations with a feathered and furry friends theme, in a personal cinema for one. One Bum Cinema Club will be situated at the Filmhouse for the duration of the Festival, as well as visiting community libraries around Edinburgh from January - March.

Find the full Manipulate Arts programme and more info here: https://www.manipulatearts.co.uk/festival/

Distance to the Moon. Scottish short animation film.