Yugoslav animated cinema did not thrive only in the Croatian capital; initiatives, studios and (most importantly) eager innovators suffused the entire region. Highlighting eight disparate artists and ten remarkable, underwatched films, this screening congregates animation in the expanded field. Triumphs of manual and stop-motion ingenuity are included, but so too are endeavors in cameraless direct-to-film etching, compilation and derivative collage, as well as certain light, movement and color manipulations. Instead of foregrounding animation narrowly, we enlarge the perspective to other optic interventions and lens- or reel-based tinkering of various kinds. The ambition is to demonstrate that original non-live-action imagemaking in the other republics blossomed—often negating, or at least being indifferent to, Zagreb’s modernist (anti-)mimetic idiom. But we also seek to focalize animation in the context of other artistic mediums, fashions and practices. Just as Fantastic Ballad, Bostjan Hladnik’s superlative white-on-black shadow play (and the earliest title in the entire retrospective), emerged out of a cooperation with lyricist Lojze Gostisa and painter France Mihelic, Vladimir Petek’s imposing intermedial opus (from which we are showing one classic and one recently digitized rarity) is in never-ending dialogue with cinema as well as with the artist’s own aesthetic evolution. Engaged in garbling the transparent image, or in dethroning animation’s central conceits, these films borrow freely from art and from transnational artistic discourses of their time.

Some of the shorts are results of accidents or contingencies: Slovene puppet wizard Crt Skodlar, as curator Igor Prassel reminds us, made Morning, Lake and Evening at Annecy after he mistakenly arrived to “the Venice of the Alps” in the year its illustrious animation biennial was not taking place, leaving the traveler with time to create. Other films (specifically Duba Sambolec’s Hands) are not animated at all, categorized as such only retroactively by the artist: “the film is an animated film with a living object. The starting idea of ​​the film was to present the hands as an autonomous living object and to explore through animation in various movements what they can do in a way as if they were separated from the body.” Still others deploy advanced ocular techniques to hallucinatory ends—rotoscoping in the case of Divna Jovanovic’s Transformation, and a barrage of pseudo-kaleidoscopic grid-adjacent filters in Slavko Almazan’s Meduza Sajana, a declared homage to Georges Méliès (but closer in spirit to the ethereal love poetics of a James Broughton or indeed to the intergalactics of Jordan Belson). Music and electronic sound effects, always assertive but never grating, play roles in the frenetic experiments of Zoran Jovanovic and Slobodan Micic, both resolute blind spots on the regional film-historical map. With Jovanovic’s Marxians—a class-conflict psychodrama that thematizes alienation both as a (de)subjectifying assault and as quite literally a process of becoming-alien (not a Martian but a Marxian)—we might be able to conclude that the films under consideration alienate, estrange the animated image, turning and twisting it into something other than itself, which is to say into the no-man’s-land between life, figment and cel-based concoction.