“Z is for Zagreb,” wrote theologian and cinema historian Ronald Holloway in his eponymous 1972 monograph, a copiously illustrated and still useful volume on Croatian animation in the English language. The “Zagreb School,” as André Martin and Georges Sadoul labeled it at the 1958 Cannes festival, denotes one of Yugoslav filmmaking’s strongest, drollest and most internationally prominent episodes. Its zenith took place from approximately 1957 (when newspaper cartoonists, illustrators, sound designers, puppeteers and hand-drawn image virtuosos of various sorts united under the aegis of the then-newly-initiated Zagreb Film) all the way to 1980 and the economic calamities inhibiting the country that decade. The group’s enormous success and popularity with transatlantic audiences is evidenced not only by abundant contemporaneous screenings, series and awards—New York’s Museum of Modern Art alone organized two extensive retrospectives by the end of the 70s—but also by the existence of Zagreb film prints in archives across North America, including at this institution. Of the (at least) seventeen gorgeously saturated copies held at the Harvard Film Archive, we have opted to project ten.

The influences, art-historical forerunners and philosophic currents from which Zagreb-associated craftspeople drew have been documented thoroughly: Walt Disney, Jiří Trnka, United Productions of America, German expressionist painting (in his assessment, Michel Ciment singles out Die Brücke as well as Der Blaue Reiter vanguardists Kandinsky and Franz Marc), Dziga Vertov, New Objectivity, Dada and the drawings/caricatures of George Grosz. Alongside them, to be sure, flourished a potent dose of Suprematism, Surrealism and the abstract hyperlinear geometrics of Mondrian. For all their conspicuous graphic indebtedness to modernist trends and ideas however, the films also tread their own unique course. Paul Morton appraises it precisely: “While the best-known Czech and Soviet animation indulges national-folk stylizations and contemporary domestic issues, the Zagreb School’s major themes are universal—industrialization, militarism, environmentalism, nuclear annihilation, and urban alienation, as well as the conforming pressures of commercialization and mass culture.” Especially invested in narratives of the hapless “small man” (mali čovjek), ten-or-so-minute titles prolifically emerging from the modestly-resourced Zagreb Film conveyor line took up motifs of existential, transhistoric magnitude with the use of fiercely au courant and anti-illusionist techniques. The company is still in operation, with over 700 animated, fourteen live-action, 600 documentary, and hundreds of educational films under its belt, along with almost a thousand advertisements. 

“People talk about the ‘Zagreb School,’ but I just came back from Yugoslavia, and I know they’re going off in all directions,” Looney Tunes superstar animator Chuck Jones reported in 1969. Indeed, the assortment on display here—with ten films spanning ten years—underlines some of the essential preoccupations and expressive variety of artist-auteurs laboring within the studio in the 60s: from Dušan Vukotić’s constructivism and the anti-machinic, paranoid dread of Vatroslav Mimica (an animator and soon-to-be eminent fiction director who himself could not draw) to anxiety-infused capers of men (and indeed exclusively men) agonizing under techno-modern duress and distress. There is even a lusciously baroque Edgar Allan Poe adaptation courtesy of Pavao Štalter and Branko Ranitović, escorted by equal parts endearing and disquieting meta-gems on animation as imaginative escape; the (im)possibility of interpersonal communication; and humankind’s smallness in the face of flora, fauna and insecthood. Transnational junctures abound, with intertitles often rendered in a buffet of major languages (English, German, French, Italian and Russian, but at times also Greek or Hebrew) and westward-oriented distribution agreements, such as with America’s Janus Films. Eastmancolor, appropriately for the period, is the color process of choice, with some of this screening’s prints looking as superb as if never spooled through a projector.