In addition to 300 finest films for all age groups, animation at this year’s Animafest comes in the form of video games, performances, exhibitions, lectures, concerts, outdoor picnics, even a Mad Hatter party!

On 26 May Novi Zagreb becomes a platform for the works of global new media icons like Max Hattler, who has been making equally good original projects and projects for IKEA, Amnesty International, and Basement Jaxx. Naturally, it is the programme called Animation Goes MSU!, announcing and accompanying this year’s Animafest Zagreb. For the fourth time, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s media façade will display the finest international site-specific animations. A special curiosity is the fact that one of the 16 works is not entirely visible to the eye; for a complete experience it needs to be photographed.

The answers to the questions what animation can be, how it is made, what trends it is subject to and how are its greatest envoys today, the 25th Animafest Zagreb will discover with its many film programmes and other events.

Introducing the festival, Animafest is scheduling almost a day-long meeting for 30 May, in the form of a family cinema-picnic at Zrinjevac. It will begin ad 16 hours with an art intervention by Pimp My Pump art collective, and end with the screening of the double award winner at Animafest 2013, Approved for Adoption  at 21 hours, and with the a party at Mad Hatter’s, at this year’s official festival club Vinyl, in Bogović Street.

All this is just an introduction into the festival week, the week you’ll hardly spend at home. For the time you won’t be spending at cinemas Europa, Tuškanac and Cineplexx Centar Kaptol, we suggest you to visit an exhibition of drawings, picture book and film by filmmaker Yumi Joung, last year’s Grand Prix winner and this year’s jury member, on 10 June at ULUPUH Gallery, then an animated durational participative performance  Portrait  by animator Thomas Johnson , or an AV performance/concert of the local attraction Nimbus Dei.

Also, at the festival club Vinyl, the most theatrical local band Chishche Lishche will be in charge of the audience and guests’ good mood and the nearby VIP will host the music/graphic French duo Gangpol & Mit.The concert, as well as the screening of Approved for Adoption, is organized as part of Rendez-vous, the festival of France in Croatia.

The relation between animation and video games will be explained at the game jam workshop, followed by a lecture by the Swiss indie game design celebrity Mario von Rickenbach, the local Croteam and Machin, and the representatives of CGDA.

The experience of making an independent feature film will be shared with the audience by the Oscar-nominated director Tomm Moore, the author of Song of the Sea from this year’s Feature Film Grand Competition, while his older colleague and Oscar-winner Chris Landreth will explain in his lecture why to animate a human face an animator needs to think like a doctor, psychologist and detective at the same time. 

Not to lose your way among the festival events, just like Cheshire Cat teaches Alice (“if you don’t care where you’re going, then it doesn’t matter which way you go”), make your own plan through Animafest’s ‘wonderland’, and all you need is the schedule you can check out on the website.