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2007.
52

FROM THE HISTORY OF CROATIAN CINEMA

Ideological Panorama of the Zagreb School of Animated Film

This article represents an attempt to illustrate a panoramic way of perceiving the world, with an all-encompassing view, on the example of three films created in the Zagreb School of Animated Film. This idea was created primarily in an ideological sphere and then gradually it developed into an aesthetic principle. Yugoslavian society sociological and historical circumstances after the World War Two caused the appearance of an illusionary »all-encompassing view« in Zagreb animated film authors. In a number of their films they created a panoramic image from a position that appeared to be focal, or simply an ideological glass dome in the middle of a world divided in blocks. Huge international success and the objective value of what was created in the Zagreb studio between the late 1950s and early 1980s were achieved mostly due to the cel animation technology mastering and a stylized movement. However, this text also claims that this was due to effective global metaphors realized by caricature techniques, a simplified schematic presentation of a cold-bloodedly divided world, but also to an ideological satire from the position of an ideological and political discourse that we call »titoism« that governed under a »glass dome«. Power hunger in socialistic societies and money obsession in capitalist ones, as well as a constant danger from an all-destroying conflict, constituted predominant themes of the Yugoslavian animated humour in all forms. Animators that used their »all-encompassing view« to circle the »panoramic« image of the world of their times were particularly inclined to use it. Their metaphors presented some phenomena that marked the Cold War period in a satirical way — arms race, inequality of the small and the poor, lack of care for environment, alienation of a contemporary man in the concrete jungle — and these global metaphors functioned as a vivid demonstration of fears for the future felt by their contemporaries. The author examines the films Velika trka (Walter and Norbert Neugebauer, 1951), perceived as a socialistic realism in a Disney guise; Koncert za mašinsku pušku (Dušan Vukotić, 1958), described as a fictitious America caricature; and Dnevnik (Nedjeljko Dragić, 1974) characterised as a real America caricature.



Midhat Ajanović

American Heaven in the Independent State of Croatia
Use of Fiction Film Techniques in Ante Babaja’s Documentary Jedan dan u Rijeci
Animated Films by Dušan Vukotić
Films by Ivan Martinac: Tactility in Splices

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