ANIMATION STUDIES

Professor Balthazar – animated series for children by Zagreb Film

Although in its heyday Zagreb Film wanted to broaden the animated film reception circles to an adult and well-educated audience, the first successful series produced by this studio, Professor Balthazar, was aimed at children. Through a meditative atmosphere, pacifism, non-violence and a lack of antagonists, or villains, Professor Balthazar discovered a new, more acceptable cartoon model in a didactic sense, in relation to his contemporaries from American studios. This paper tackles the aesthetics and animation techniques used for this cartoon and particularly focuses attention on how they changed through the four seasons. Special attention is dedicated to individual qualities of animators and how they blended in a joint endeavor. Finally, the author tries to find the ethical message of the whole cartoon series in the final episode which he considers to be envisaged as a warning that even Balthazar’s world can lose its magic in a blink of an eye if it is not careful enough.

Luigi Scarpa