Mar 25, 2023

The strangest and most stylish cartoon ever is now available for free on Youtube!

Zagreb Film produced some of the wildest and most varied animated short films of the 20th century, but their work has been exceptionally difficult to appreciate.

In 2008, I organized a DVD of Zagreb Film's "lost masterpieces." However, the minimally distributed DVDs consisted of unrestored prints and did not do justice to the beautiful colors and designs of the studio's films.

Thankfully, the rarity of these animated gems is a thing of the past. The studio's films have been restored over the past decade with the support of the Croatian government and are regularly shown for free on a dedicated Youtube page.

Zagreb films took more risks, both in content and in form, than most American studios had dared to take since the 1940s. In many ways, Zagreb was in the vein of the American studio United Productions of America. United Productions of America succumbed to commercial pressures in the mid-1950s and abandoned its earlier ambitions to experiment with the film medium. Zagreb Film was born at the same time that United Productions of America lost its prestige and enjoyed a period of glory as an upstart European studio until the 1970s. Zagreb Film is still in existence today.

It's hard to pick a favorite film, so I've embedded a handful below; there are dozens more on the Youtube page, and hundreds more that have yet to be released (it's unclear how complete the Youtube page is, but take what you can get).

It is also important to have the right mindset when watching these films. There is a spirit of unrestrained graphic experimentation and a constant search for new ideas in their films. Their willingness to avoid easy formulas means that not all of their films are huge successes, but even those that are not tend to contain interesting elements; Animation Obsessive describes one of the studio's films:

Basically, the work follows its own rules. It's bizarre. It is dogmatically anti-Disney. Often it has a storyline that has never been dealt with in animation before. As Zagreb Film director Dušan Vukoti once said, animation that does not mimic the movements of reality needs abstract sounds that "do not mimic the noise of reality."