ANIMATION

Three Outstanding Films

The biannual cadence of the Zagreb Animation Festival gives an opportunity to find on the screen the living portrait of the turn of the century / turn of the millennium production, 2000-2002. Three films screened and awarded last June outstand from the history of animation viewpoint. The first one is Michael Dudok de Wit’s Father and Daughter, Grand Prix and Oscar winner. Father and Daughter is the ultimate auteur film. The technique is traditional pencil and charcoal. The images depict recognizable human beings and landscapes. The ending remains open: was the story the girl’s dream, or imagination, or did she joined her father in the afterlife? Father and Daughter doesn’t try to please the audience; it conveys a special feeling. Michael Dudok de Wit sports a talent for creating movement. Both in this film and in his previous The Monk and the Fish, characters act and gesticulate in an expressive staccato style. Also, harsh light on characters had never been as eloquent as in the final sequence of this subtle drama.
Tuning the Instruments by Jerzy Kucia (award for outstanding qualities) is a masterpiece and the best film of this author. It is perfectly synaesthetic work — the images would be meaningless without the soundtrack and vice versa. Apart from its captivating imagery and its intense poetry, Tuning the Instruments is the ultimate hypnotic and hypnotizing film, where the viewer enters into a new psychic dimension of sound and images.
Barcode by Adriaan Lokman was awarded by the Zagreb 2002 jury for »the unique way the illusion of animation is created by the manipulation of light and shadows«. This work mirrors itself in the work of Alexandre Alexeieff and Norman McLaren. Lokman evidently recapitulates here some stylistic lessons of abstract film-making that became rooted in our visual collective consciousness. Barcode is at any rate an inspired, innovative artistic achievement.

Giannalberto Bendazzi