Dušan Vukotić (1927.-1998.)
Dušan Vukotić Vud – A Great Career
A biographical paper on the late filmmaker
Dušan Vukotić, a renowned animation author and the first
Oscar winner for a foreign animated film (Surrogate 1962).
The paper specifically clarifies the early days of Croatian
animated film production.
Dušan Vukotić, nicknamed
Vud (born on February 7, 1927 in Bileća, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, died on July 8, 1998 in Zagreb,
Croatia.) came to Zagreb to study architecture in 1948.
To support himself he contributed caricatures to dailies
in Zagreb, and eventually became a contract caricaturist
for the satirical weekly Kerempuh.
This paper initiated the production of cartoon films,
and after the first film directed by the brothers Neugebauer
was released, the animated film company Duga was established
in Zagreb in 1951. It was there that Dušan Vukotić made
his first cartoon film Kićo (How Kićo Was Born,
1951). In spite of the fact that the company was quite
successful as a production house, it was ruthlessly liquidated
as a result of the national economic crisis. The filmmakers
were scattered, but Dušan Vukotić, infected with the possibilities
of animation, continued to make 30-second trailers (13
in total) with collaborator Nikola Kostelac in his apartment.
In the trailers he experimented with stylized design, minimized
animation and timing. On the basis of this work, Vukotić
became one of the leading figures in the newly established Cartoon Film Studio (Studio
crtanog filma, 1956) of the company Zagreb-film which
specialized in short films.
The stylistic features of
the trailers became a pattern on which the studio’s style
was shaped for some time. The studio started a dynamic
production with numerous authors. Its first film was
Vukotić’s The Playful Robot (Nestašan
robot, 1956). The studio’s first appearance at foreign
festivals was at the Cannes Film Festival in 1958 and
that was a tremendous success. Three of Vukotić’s films
were shown among seven other studio films, and the studio’s
production was dubbed »The Zagreb School of Animation«.
Vukotić’s permanent defiance of tradition and routine,
his eager search for new thematic, stylistic and production
pathways eventually led him to further innovations.
In Picollo (1959),
deviating from the previous division of labor between a
director and »executors«, Vukotić assumed all the main
creative functions (script, direction, design, animation),
thereby introducing the practice of »complete authorship«.
The international success of the Zagreb »School« and Vukotić
personally was crowned by an Academy Award for Vukotić’s Surrogate in
1962, the first Oscar for a foreign
animated film. As a result Vukotić became not only famous
abroad, but he was treated as a kind of a hero in the ex-Yugoslavia.
He was invited to hold lectures, to be a member of various
juries and committees, as well as a member of the party
elite in Croatia and Yugoslavia. In his new position he
turned to feature film production and from 1966, he made
a total of three feature films while occasionally working
on short animated films as well.
In these animated films,
his experimental bent became even more manifest. He also
made combined feature and short animated films (Oscar nominated The Play,
1963; A Stain on the Conscience,
1967; Ars Gratia Artis, 1970). He eventually became
a professor of feature film direction at Zagreb’s film
school (The Academy of Dramatic Arts) and remained there
until his retirement in the late 1980’s. Death caught up
with him during final preparations for a feature-length
animated film he was set to make in the Czech Republic.
Vukotić won a total of 146 awards, including three life
achievement awards. The last one was awarded to him at
the Zagreb International Animation Festival in 1994. His
work is proof that great works of art, the core of the
world’s cultural inheritance, can be created in small national
environments too.
An exhaustive filmography is supplied in an addendum to the
paper.
Borivoj Dovniković-Bordo |
