In his report from the 1964 Annecy Festival, the third edition of the oldest international animation festival, Derek Hill lamented the poor global selection but nevertheless concluded that the governments of Canada and Yugoslavia remained “the two most enlightened cartoon sponsors in the world” (28). Hill’s assertion foreshadowed the multifarious transnational convergence of animation cultures as a vehicle of global identity-building in Canada, Yugoslavia, and Croatia. Though geographically distant and politically divergent, Canada and Yugoslavia shared several important traits. Both countries maintained a special relationship with the USA while remaining relatively neutral in the Cold War. Whereas Canada asserted its national identity in contradistinction to its neighbor, socialist Yugoslavia relied on the US as the guarantor of its geopolitical (and anticolonial) non-alignment and a role model for its experimentation with capitalist economics. Both Canada and Yugoslavia ostensibly functioned as con-federalist states comprising provinces and territories and republics and provinces respectively. Québec and socialist Croatia occupied similar positions relative to the more dominant identities of Anglo-Canadian and Serbian, seeing a contemporaneous rise of nationalism during the Quiet Revolution and the Croatian Spring that culminated in the coeval 1990s Québec independence movement and the Croatian War of Independence. Significantly, both Canada and Yugoslavia championed animated, documentary, and educational cinema as central to their utilitarian social agenda, while singling out short animation as a low-budget art form distinct from better known US cartoons. No wonder, then, that Yugoslav and Canadian animators jointly exerted their worldwide influence within the ASIFA (Association Internationale du Film d’Animation).
Two formerly biennial events secured the global outreach of Canadian and (post-)Yugoslav animation: World Festival of Animated Film (aka Animafest) Zagreb and the Ottawa International Animation Festival. Established in 1972, the Zagreb Festival gained recognition as the second oldest international animation festival in the world. The accolades won by the studio Zagreb Film, including the Academy Award for Ersatz (1961, directed by Dušan Vukotić) as the first non-US winner in the short animation category, further cemented the Croatian capital as a nodal point of international animation. The Ottawa Festival, founded in 1976, became the North American counterpart to the Zagreb Festival, displacing the US as the default animation centre and putting forward various forms of transcultural transfer.
The role of politics in judging at the two festivals and its relationship to the formation of cultural identities is particularly interesting. The list of (post-)Yugoslav animators awarded at the Ottawa Festival includes Ante Zaninović (Disinfection, 1976), Zdenko Gašparović (Satiemania, 1978), Rastko Ćirić (The Tower of Lalilon, 1988) and Nebojša Rogić (We Are Not Angels 2, 2005). Among other Canadian laureates (“NFB AWARD WINNERS…” 2024), Richard Condie received awards at the Zagreb Festival for Getting Started (1979) and Pigbird (1981). The Zagreb Festival’s first recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award (1986) was the (Scottish-)Canadian juggernaut Norman McLaren, followed by his colleagues, the American-Canadian Caroline Leaf (1996) and the Dutch-Canadian Paul Driessen (2002). The Montrealer John Weldon, whose Academy Award-winning Special Delivery (1978, co-directed with Eunice Macaulay) triumphed in Zagreb, said that he liked the Yugoslav festival “because ‘the whole country is involved’ and ‘animated shorts there are like hockey is here’—the national obsession” (Hussey 1979, 6).
Another interesting aspect of the transnational exchange is the dynamics of minority representation. For example, in addition to the aforementioned Canadian female animators, Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis won the Grand Prize in Zagreb for When the Day Breaks (1999). In 1974, Animation from Cape Dorset, a unique collection of 17 shorts produced by Inuit artists at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), received a special Jury Award for Ingenuity in Zagreb: “Innovative techniques such as sand animation and double-exposure pixilation of a human were created for the first time ever. The films riveted the attention of local and international publics” (Roth 2013, 368).
Figure 1. Still from the Yugo-Canadian co-production Man: The Polluter (1973). NFB Blog.
Another area of imbrication is transnational co-productions, especially in terms of their growing ecological awareness. For instance, in 1973, Canadian and Yugoslav animators co-produced a fascinating collection of educational documentary-animated films Man: The Polluter, employing 18 artists from Zagreb Film and comments supplied by Fred Knelman, Professor of Science and Human Affairs at Sir George Williams University (Montreal). Two artists-in-residence from Zagreb, Zlatko Grgić and Boris Kolar, produced three shorts for the NFB in 1971 and 1974 (Martín-Flórez 2022). A co-producer of Man: The Polluter, the American-Canadian Don Arioli, frequently contributed to Zagreb Film productions such as the iconic TV series Professor Balthazar (1967-1978) which was broadcast around the world (including the USA, Canada, Australia, and China). The leitmotif of the series, pacifism, featured prominently in Yugoslav and Canadian animation, often in conjunction with anxiety about nuclear and environmental devastation (Morton 2020). Environmental concerns also informed another planetary popular animated TV show The Little Flying Bears (1990-1991), co-produced by Zagreb Film and CinéGroupe (Montreal). The children’s show about a utopian community of little flying bears tackled the danger of pollution and forest fires. Its premiere coincided with the twilight of socialist Yugoslavia and the emergence of independent Croatia in which both Zagreb Film and the Zagreb Festival continued to refashion their international profile while consistently acknowledging the stature of Canadian animation.
References:
Hill, Derek. 1964. “Animation amid the Animators: A Report from the Annecy Festival.” Film Quarterly 17 (3): 25-28.
Hussey, Charlotte. 1979. “Spot Light on… Eunice Macaulay and John Weldon.” Cinema Canada ?: 4-8.
Martín-Flórez, Camilo. 2022. “Zagreb Film and the NFB: A 50-Year-Old Gem Gets Its Online Premiere: A Curator’s Perspective.” blog.nfb.ca/blog/2022/12/18/zagreb-film-and-the-nfb-a-50-year-old-gem-gets-its-online-premiere-curators-perspective/.
Morton, Paul. 2020. “Boomerangs and Bombs: The Zagreb School of Animation and Yugoslavia’s Third Way Experiment.” Slavic Review 79 (1): 115-138.
“NFB AWARD WINNERS @ ANIMAFEST ZAGREB.” 2024. www.nfb.ca/channels/animafest-zagreb/.
Roth, Lorna. 2013. Canadian First People’s Mediascapes: Reframing a Snapshot with Three Corners. In Mediascapes: New Patterns in Canadian Communication, 4th edition, edited by Leslie Regan Shade, 364-389. University of Toronto Press.
Dragan Batančev is the guest curator of the Transnational Animation theme of Animation Studies 2.0. He is a faculty member at Liberal Arts, Yorkville University/Toronto Film School. He has published on topics such as unmade Yugoslav anti-imperialist co-productions, the economics of shortage and the archival impulse in socialist revolutionary media, Cold War film festivals, transnational Westerns, and Ukrainian women’s documentary cinema. His current research investigates the global impact of Canadian and (post-)Yugoslav animation cultures.