PORTRAIT OF AN AUTHOR: BORIVOJ DOVNIKOVIĆ

Stylistic Coherence of Dovniković’s Opus

Borivoj Dovniković-Bordo had quite an interesting and unusual artistic development. He left his native town of Osijek to pursue his dream and become a cartoonist. He began his career in the weekly satiric magazine Kerempuh and this work eventually introduced him into the world of animation through the project The Big Meeting that he worked on as animator and assistant. Ever since he has remained in the world of animation, that is to say, for five decades, with only one interruption when he shortly returned to his first calling — cartoons. Thus he participated in all the evolutionary phases of the Zagreb School of Animated film.

For the first eleven years he mostly collaborated on other authors’ projects. Only after many years of practice in animation did he in 1961 come out with his debut film Dolly. Since then until 1995 a number of other works followed creating an impressive author’s opus that certainly made him one the most significant and unavoidable protagonists of the Zagreb School of Animated film.

The author of the text chose eleven films — Dolly (1961), Untitled (1964), Curiosity (1966), Krek (1967), Manoeuvres (1971), Second class passenger (1973), J. D. (1976), The School of Walking (1978), One Day in Life (1982), Two Lives (1984), An Exciting Love Story (1989) — which he analyses in order to reveal the basis of Dovniković’s poetics. The author establishes that Dovniković was influenced by Disney, newspaper cartoons and comics, and on these grounds he created his most important works.

While refusing to accept that characters are one-dimensional or simple geometric shapes karyokinetically multiplied, Dovniković accepts the functionality of a simplified, only slightly coloured surface. He does not hide the fact that his heroes draw roots from cartoons. Caricature free of sarcasm or bombastic and spectacular gags is a permanent characteristic of his work. His works always include a well-known nice hero of a rather bland appearance, a man from the fringes of society constantly struggling with repressive ’eager’ individuals or some global destructive forces always hovering over him.

Although the fact that the Zagreb school’s potentials were never fully realized, that some of its authors quickly gave up on animation (Mimica, Bourek, Marks, Štalter...), while others died rather young (Grgić, Kostelac, Vukotić, Zaninović, Vunak) discouraged Borivoj Dovniković, he nevertheless managed to keep his place on the Croatian and world scene of animation — as one of the greatest — owing to his personal vitality and the obvious resilience of his opus that with time became only more impressive and coherent.

Petar Krelja