Croatian Animation and Imagination from Zagreb Film - Thurs. July 17 - 8PM


Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Croatian Animation and Imagination from Zagreb Film, a program offering the most charming, stylish, and award-winning Croatian animation, mini-docs and short films from the internationally acclaimed studio Zagreb Film. Founded in 1953, Zagreb Film has produced thousands of short films and garnered over 400 international festival awards. Dusan Vukotic, the first non-American to win an Oscar for an animated short, created some of the most stylish of all mid-century cartoons including the witty anti-materialist short Ersatz (AKA Surogat, 1961) and the utterly charming space race-era The Cow on the Moon (1958).  Zlatko Grgic gives us more spacy cartoon cuteness with the tale of a little girl and a little lost alien in A Visit from Space (1954) and a hilarious bit of animated misdirection in Little and Big (1966).  Take an amusing animated look at the history of style in Borivoj Dovniković's Clothing and Fashion: A History (1972). Nedeljko Dragić's Oscar-nominated Tup-Tup (1972) is a darkly-comedic animated commentary on the effects of urbanization. Head on a surreal train trip to the end of the line with Bogdan Zizic's A Journey (1972).  View the innate creativity of children as they explore musical education in the beautiful mini-doc Mur-Bur (1969).  Two artists –one a glassblower, one a painter– collaborate to create Art in Glass (1972).  Plus, Dragutin Vunak's Little Train (1969) and another Borivoj Dovniković: Learning to Walk (1978) plus more surprises from one of the best international animation studios in history!


Date: Thursday, July 17th, 2014 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com



Highlights include:



Ersatz (AKA Surogat) (Color, 1961) 
This Yugoslavian animated short directed by the great Dusan Vukotic was the first foreign animated film to win an Oscar. A fat man goes to the beach and inflates everything he needs. like a boat, a tent, and a shark. He manages to have a fine time until he inflates a girlfriend for himself and realizes that women are too much damn trouble. A gem of mid-century modern style!

The Cow on the Moon (Color, 1958)
Another stunning charmer from Dusan Vukotic.  A little nerdy girl is trying to build a rocket to the moon when the town bully decides to trash her model.  She sees the opportunity to trick the dim-witted boy and pretends to send him to the moon where he encounters some strange "alien" beings.  

Learning to Walk (Color, 1978)
A witty cartoon from Borivoj Dovniković that celebrates those that dance (or walk as it were) to their own drummer.  A little man has his own unique walk, but everyone he passes seems to think their own walk is better and feels compelled to push it on the little man until he is walking like a crippled Frankenstein monster.  Our hero decides that he's happy walking his own way, regardless of what other people think.

Little and Big (Color, 1966)
Zlatko Grgic's absurd take on the cartoon clichéd chase scene.  A big man chases a little one, the little one chases the big one, and what's the meaning you ask? Grgic declares hilariously "There is no meaning!"




Tup-Tup (Color, 1972, Nedeljko Dragić)
Another Academy-Award nominee, this sly dark comedy features a man just trying to get to sleep.  The sounds of the city disturb him one by one until he revolts and sets fire to the whole city and flees to the quiet of the country. Will he finally get to dreamland, or will the country have its own noisy revenge?

A Journey (Dir. Bogdan Zizic, Color, 1972)
A meditation on time, life and death, human connection in this dreamlike, wordless film from Yugoslavia. Passengers on a train disappear one by one whenever the train emerges from a tunnel…

Mur-Bur (Color, 1969)
Revel in the joy of children learning to play music.  This poetic mini-doc shows the Elly Basic New School of Music that believed in the innate potential of all children to enrich their lives through music.  Directed by Nikola Babic.


Art in Glass (Color, 1972)
Explore the glory of the artistic process and the beauty of collaboration between artists as painter Antun Motika and glass-blower Ermanno Nason work together to create incredible glass sculptures.

Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder.  She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has been scouring the archive for the best of Eastern European Animation for over 3 years.



About Oddball Films
Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.