Andrijana Ružić

Zagreb School of Animation is an informal name (formulated by French film critics Martin and Sadoul) of a group of Yugoslav filmmakers whose highly innovative short animated films, characterized by their common “spiritual specificity”, had made a great impact on the international animation scene by the end of the Fifties. Two distinctive, artistic currents co-existed from the very beginning within Avant-guard Zagreb School of animation: existentialist current, evolved from Vatroslav Mimica’s modernistic ideas, and satirical, gag-oriented current, represented by the films of Dušan Vukotić. In the historical context of a newly established Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia animation directors from Zagreb were able to create their films in a relative freedom since the art of non-verbal animation was fairly marginalized and thus seemed less compromising in comparison to verbalized documentary and live action films. Nevertheless in 1958 the Yugoslav censorship authorities prohibited the international screenings of the first two Mimica’s short films, Samac (Alone) and Happy End. The director was forced to literally smuggle them over the border and present them to the Film Festivals of Cannes and Venice, where they eventually triumphed. Why these films weren’t allowed by the authorities to move outside the Yugoslav borders? For one simple reason: the state censors retained that the murky and pessimistic contents of Mimica hermetical films could not possibly reflect the overall state of wellbeing and optimistic mood in a new, socialist union of Yugoslav republics. Mimica’s films reverberate anxieties and alienation of contemporary individuals in modern, technological post-war societies; they openly demonstrate the director’s pessimism, his disbelief in a human being and in futility of individual’s attempts to give meaning to a tedious existence. It is starting from these bold narrative and visual contents of Mimica’s opus that I intend to delineate the persisting, guiding idea of absurd in other animated shorts produced at Zagreb film and directed by Vlado Kristl, Ante Zaninović, Aleksandar Marks, Vladimir Jutriša. The absurdist discourse will reach its peak by the end of the Sixties, in the films of Nedeljko Dragić (Maybe Diogenes, Passing Days, Tup tup) and Zlatko Grgić (Big and Small, Twidle-twidle), in which a “satirical-absurdist synthesis of individual’s destiny” is expressed through a variety of exquisitely absurd gags, supposedly with no message.

Andrijana Ružić (Belgrade, 1972) graduated in History and Criticism of Art at the Università degli Studi in Milan, Italy where she fell in love with the medium of animation. She specialized in History of animated film under professor Giannalberto Bendazzi: the subject of her master thesis was the opus of John and Faith Hubley. In the last seven years she has been collaborating with the International Comics Festival in Belgrade where she is a curator of the section dedicated to animated film, lecturing and screening the films of a single independent author. She writes articles about art and animation for the Serbian weekly magazine Vreme. She also loves to mingle with authors of animated films during animation festivals and is constantly inspired by their perseverance, dedication, modesty and stunning works of art. Andrijana is an independent scholar, based in Milan and she is about to publish her first book about life and work of Michael Dudok de Wit.