Erika Roša reports from the Animafest Zagreb Croatian Film Competition 2 programme, in our GoCritic! Review series.

Croatian Film Competition 2: Solidarity, Inequality and Loneliness - What It Means to Be Human

A common thread connecting the films shown in the Croatian Film Competition 2 at the 34th Animafest Zagreb (3-8 June 2024) is the use of animals and other creatures as vehicles for questioning the problems of mankind, such as social inequality, personal struggles with loneliness, and relationships falling apart.

Two films in the section tackle the importance of solidarity by placing their characters in the context of a garden, an enclosed microcosm whose inhabitants are mutually dependent upon one another. Sunčana Brkulj’s 'Butterfly' is a 2D stop-motion claymation depicting a community of strange, small creatures inhabiting a garden with a well at its centre. The many characters are distributed at multiple angles to the static frame, meaning the viewer’s eye is drawn in different directions, making the film a lighter version of Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”. Pastel colours dominate this highly functioning arcadia, where each character serves a purpose. But when a butterfly finds itself stuck in the well, blocking the water supply and endangering the whole ecosystem, real teamwork is needed to get things back to normal. Regardless of its happy ending, Brkulj’s film clearly highlights the interdependence of all creatures and the importance of solidarity for the functioning of the whole community.

Butterfly

A lack of solidarity is directly criticized in 'Catlands', a Slovenian-Croatian film by Ana Čigon. This 2D computer animation depicts a world governed by colourful cats, living in gardens separated by borders and walls. The film clearly illustrates social inequalities: fluffier cats live in luxuriant pastoral settings, eating delicacies, while the shaggy trespassing migrant cats have barely any food. The aristocats hold a summit to tackle the migration crisis, communicating in meows and purrs, and it’s no surprise that the agreement is to the detriment of the poorest echelons. The scene in which lower-class cats migrate suspended by balloons and meowing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the starry night sky is a clear social critique of damaging EU migration policies, and much like Butterfly, it affirms the need for solidarity, but this time round, without a happy ending.

Catlands 

While Catlands offers a strong criticism of social inequality and in Butterfly a catastrophe is avoided thanks to a still-present solidarity in a tight-knit community, in Marija Vulić’s 'Tower' we encounter a post-apocalyptic world. This 2D computer animation in shades of grey is set in a devastated land at night-time. The protagonist, Klobučar, an anthropomorphic beaked creature, is apparently the only living being left after an unidentified disaster and they create an imaginary friend from a white sock. But soon Klobučar realizes that another creature has also survived and that the sock belonged to his late daughter. This precious object becomes a test for the two of them, who can either fight it out and assert their dominance in their cold dystopian world, or find empathy within themselves, which would mark the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Tower 

Two protagonists inhabiting a strange land are also at the centre of Eugen Bilankov’s 2D animation, 'Windows from the South', but this film distinguishes itself by introducing documentary elements. The story tells the tale of a couple who break up after a nine-year relationship, having finally bought a flat. This time, the landscape is surrealistic and made up of colourful, voluptuous body parts with the addition of juicy fruits, illustrating the characters’ psychological side and suggesting that a sexual problem lies at the core of the breakup. We hear fragments of conversations between the protagonists (voiced by the director and his girlfriend Nikolina Žapčić), which add an autobiographical and documentarian element to the animated images. The paradox of the young couple buying their own home only to break up soon afterward, and their candour in assessing the relationship that should have ended long ago, make the film wonderfully humorous but also quite melancholy. This humour is interestingly combined with the surrealist images that follow one another through associative connections which should clash with the documentary aspect of the voiceover, but they actually help reveal that a situation that would normally equate to a personal shipwreck can become a liberation.

Windows from the South 

By turning their protagonists into animals and creatures to tackle common struggles in contemporary society, these films ask the same question we’ve been pondering over since Ovid’s Metamorphoses: what does it mean to be a human being in today’s world? Whether the various characters are dealing with a problem in the community, looking for a better life, trying to ease their loneliness, or coming to terms with a breakup, the common human denominator is their desire to belong and to be understood.

(cover photo: Catlands by Ana Čigon)

contributed by: Erika Roša 

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