The upcoming World Festival of Animated Film, Animafest Zagreb, which will take place from June 6-9 in the Croatian capital, will include a rich programme for children and youths.
Animafest Zagreb, established in 1972, is the world’s second-oldest festival dedicated entirely to animation, taking place every year in June. It promotes all forms of creative animation throughout the world – from traditional drawings, CGI and stop-motion, to the experimental cross-media forms, devoting even years to short films, and odd years to feature films.
The Grand Competition in short film will include 44 films by international authors.
This year, the Family programme was categorised by age into four groups – for children aged 4-7, for those aged 7-10, those 10-14, and, finally, for children over 14 years old. The short films for the programme deal with the topics of strength, love and music, and three animated feature films will be shown within the programme.
The first is the Oscar-nominated The Breadwinner (2017) by Nora Twomey, a story of Parvani, an 11 year old girl living under Taliban rule in Afghanistan.
The second, a stop-motion 3D film, Frankenweenie (2012) by Tim Burton, is a heart warming tale of a boy and his dog, inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and imbued by Burton’s unique dark humour and vision.
The third film is the 2016 animated version of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes, a book of poetry which retells famous children’s fairy tales such as The Three Little Pigs, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood, and intertwines them, with surprising twists.
A workshop on animated film for children will be organised in the Zagreb’s Museum of Arts and Crafts, and will centre around Professor Balthasar, a Croatian animated television series from the 1960s and 70s, about an old scientist whose creative inventions save his town’s problems.
The series, one of the most successful creations of the Zagreb School of Animation, and professor Balthasar as a character, have become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon, and it has been one of the most recognisable, and beloved, animated series in Croatia for almost 50 years.
Individual tickets for the Grand Competition and the Family programme cost 25 kuna (€3), while family tickets, with access to all the screenings for children, are available in two models 1+1 (one adult and one child) for 100 kuna (€13.50), and 1+2 (one adult and two children) for 150 kuna (€20).
(€1 = 7.38 kuna)
