FAMOUS CROATS, Dušan Vukotić

Dušan Vukotić In no area of film culture has Croatian cinematography left such a globally visible mark as it did in animated film. This can primarily be attributed to the production of the Zagreb Film studio from the mid-1950s to the 1970s, a group of authors and films commonly called the “Zagreb School of Animated Films”. And the most famous among them is undoubtedly Dušan Vukotić, the director who won an Oscar for “The Substitute” in 1961. Vukotić is also the only author of Croatian films to win an American Academy Award. Dušan Vukotić was born in 1927 in Bileća (Bosnia and Herzegovina). Like many future directors of the Zagreb School, Vukotić also studied architecture. Furthermore, like a number of Zagreb animators, he honed his first creative experiences in the medium of caricature. Since the beginning of the 1950s, he had been active in animation, first as an animator, then as a director of dedicated films, and from the 1950s also of original films. Immediately after the foundation of the new studio in 1956, he created his first directorial work, “Naughty Robot”. From that moment, a handful of creative people – directors, animators and cartoonists – gathered around the newly created studio, and tried to pave their way into animated film. They realized that they had neither the resources nor the experience to compete with Disney in full, illusionistic animation. Instead, they began to explore reduced animation with simplified surfaces, stylized movement and an emphasis on gags. In doing so, they relied on the experiences of caricature, but also on the strong visual culture of the 1950s Zagreb, especially on EXAT 51. Thematically, the authors of the Zagreb School are the children of the then non-bloc and politically ambitious Yugoslavia. In the films, they question militarism, global weaponization, but also the side effects of modernization and urbanization. Their topics were global, as was their reception. As early as 1958, eight films from Zagreb were shown in the Cannes program, and prominent French film critic Georges Sadoul gave the group of authors a name that will remain: “L'École du Zagreb”. Among them, Vukotić was the most successful, but also the most typical representative. In his first films, he plays with the convention of Western genres and parodies it (“Cowboy Jimmy”, 1957, “Machine Gun Concert”, 1958, “Cow on the Moon”, 1959). His most mature phase followed from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, when he shot his three arguably most famous films: “Piccolo” (1959), “The Substitute” (1961) and “The Game” (1962), with “The Substitute” remaining the most famous one primarily because it won the American Academy Award, making Vukotić the first non-American to win an Oscar for an animated film. “The Substitute” is in many ways a typical Vukotić: a film about the absurdities of modernization created with an original, almost abstract visual style that effectively uses proportions, whiteness and an empty frame. Vukotić continued to successfully engage in animated films until the 1970s. He gradually tried his hand as a director of full-length feature films, but not nearly as successfully. He shot the feature films “The Seventh Continent” (1966), the urban war thriller “Operation Stadium” (1981) and the sci-fi film “Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy” (1981). He died in Zagreb in 1998 at the age of 71. Jurica Pavičić, writer, columnist and film critic