The first day of the festival begins with morning screenings for the youngest audience – from 10am the Movieplex cinema is screening the Children’s Competition entries. The final animated adventure for children of the first festival day is scheduled for 8pm at the Movieplex in the form of a charming fox – Fantastic Mr. Fox by Wes Anderson, whose head cartoonist Christian De Vita will join us at the festival.

The Tuškanac cinema programme begins at 6pm and will present the life and work of one of the “masters of animation”, Jacques Drouin. This Canadian filmmaker has spent the last 30 years experimenting with specific, demanding and rarely used animation technique, the so-called pinscreen animation. The programme will present the film Jacques Drouin in Relief, a biographic documentary portraying Drouin from early childhood in east Quebec to a career at the Canadian National Film Board. Complete with numerous excerpts and unknown images from his personal collection, this film is a tribute to a lifetime work and a valuable lesson in film. Two of Drouin’s films will also be screened within this programme, representing examples of pinscreen animation technique.

At 8pm the programme at the Tuškanac cinema continues with a retrospective of Georges Schwizgebel, award-winning director of a host of animated films and one of the most acclaimed Swiss artists in general. The programme includes 14 animated films.

The programme at the Europa cinema begins at 4pm with the Grand Panorama: out of 12 entries, three are made in Croatia – Gulliver by Zdenko Bašić, Keep Going by Darko Vučenik and Format by Darko Bakliža.

Following the official opening ceremony, at 8pm at the Europa cinema, the Animafest Special programme will be screened: 45 minutes of five exceptional animated works that provide an insight into the basics of animation techniques, but also a miniature overview of this year’s festival programmes. It includes films by three “masters of animation”, Inspiration by Karel Zeman, Crac! by Frederic Back and Mindscape by Jacques Drouin, followed by a product of Aardman Studio, Creature Comforts by Nick Park and The Monk and the Fish by Michael Dudok De Wit, made at the Folimage Studio.

The top of the line programme begins at 10pm – the first Grand Competition programme. Among eight completely disparate animated works, we should stress Tussilago, an interesting animated documentary by the Swede Jonas Odell, and Please Say Something by the Irish filmmaker David O’Reilly, an original combination of experiment and animation. The fact that it won the Cartoon d’Or award for the best European animated film in 2009 is a notable recommendation. Another film worth mentioning is I Love You by Katy O’Connor, the head animator working on Richard Linklater’s Scanner Darkly and Lars von Trier’s Five Obstructions.