With the highest programming intensity, the World Festival of Animated Film continues today from 9:30 a.m. in all theatres and galleries. Among the early risers, according to good custom, we include children and young people whose programme, along with a Q&A with the authors, takes place in Kinoteka (Films for Children Competition 2, age 7-10, 9:30, guests Ignas Meilūnas and Justė Beniušytė, director and producer of Hoofs on Skates, Martin Smatana, director of Hello Summer, and Kristel Tõldsepp, producer of The Mystery of Missing Socks), but also at Sesvete People’s University (Filip Pošivač’s feature film Even Mice Belong in Heaven at 10 a.m.), as well as film scholars, who gather at the second part of the Animafest Scanner XI symposium at KIC (panels on humour in animation and authorship in the age of artificial intelligence from 9:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. Presented by: Akira Arimochi, Martina Tritthart, Jeremy Speed-Schwartz, Farzaneh Omidvarnia and Mehrdad Sheikhan, Melanie Beisswenger, Andy Buchanan, Paola Bristor, Monica Apellaniz Portos and Claudius Stemmler). Films for Children Competition 2, i.e. the programme for younger schoolchildren, contains ecological, skating, cosmic, family and summer stories, as well as one about the secret world of socks. The participants of the AFN Edu event (which continues from 10 in the MM Centre) will also get up earlier, followed by lectures by Diana Cam Van Nguyen (11:30 a.m.) about her extremely successful film Dear Dad, and by Michaela Mihályi and David Štumpf (1 p.m.) about the movie S*it Happens.

At 11:00 a.m., the SC Cinema turns on the projector for World Panorama 1, while at 12:00 p.m. the SC Gallery hosts the official opening of the traditional group exhibition Behind the Scenes 6, which in its sixth edition features the works of 34 authors of the Grand Competition Short Film and the Student Film Competition in a wide range from paintings, sketches, drawings, prints, cut-outs, through parts of set design, models, studies, recording books, installations and multimedia.

At 1 p.m., the programme continues in the SC Cinema with the sixth segment of the theme humour programme dedicated to human nature. The time span from 1988 to 2018 includes works by Mark Baker (The Village), Stepan Koval (The Tram # 9 Was Going), Christa Moesker (Sientje), John Schnall (Goodnight Norma… Goodnight Milton…), Daniel Nocke (No Room for Gerold), Alison Snowden and David Fine (Bob’s Birthday), Jan Pinkava (Gerri’s Game), Céline Devaux (Sunday Lunch) and Sawako Kabuki (Waaah). This is followed by the programme Time for the Masters  (3:30 p.m.), in which contemporary classics present new works and answer questions from the audience. Ruth Lingford and Anna Makarova (historical documentary Hammer of the Witches), Xi Chen (creative advertisement for the Songmont women’s bag brand), Canadian pinscreen artist Michèle Lemieux (The Painting), German abstract animation, video installation and performance artist Max Hattler (TWENTYTNƎWT filmed in pandemic Hong Kong) and 2018 Animafest winner Boris Labbé (The Glass House) will be in the theatre after the screening of their films. We will also see the recently restored film by the author of the Zagreb School, Branko Ranitović, Pozivnica, a new work by Zagreb’s favorite Theodore Ushev The Wolf, as well as brand new works by the great Witold Giersz (Horse Portrait) and Koji Yamamura (Extremely Short).

At 4:00 p.m., the third block of the Czech retrospective will be held in Kinoteka, which compares canonical authors with those who have been somewhat overlooked in the history of film – Pojar (A Drop Too Much), Brdečka (Looove!), Trnka (The Hand), Pavlátová (Repete) and others meet, for example, Karel Dodal and Irena Dodalova (Fantasie érotique).

Today, the theme programme of humour shows another slot, entertained with dark humour (MSU, 5 pm), mostly characteristic of films made in the past two decades. Scheduled are: Rejected (Don Hertzfeldt), Una furtiva lagrima (Carlo Vogele), Ward 13 (Peter Cornwell), Last Wife of Blue Beard (Alexander Bubnov), Blue Dream (Malte Stein), Lesley the Pony Has an A+ Day! (Christian Larrave), French Killers (Nicolas Jacquet), How to Cope with Death (Ignacio Ferreras) and Kata Gugić’s Cockpera. At the same time, KIC will present the books: Animating Art by editors Stefano Stratilo and Holger Lang, Making the Cut at Pixar: The Art of Editing Animation by Bill Kinder and Bobbie O’Steen and two bilingual publications that offer an analysis of contemporary Portuguese directors (David Doutel, Vasco Sá, Laura Gonçalves and Alexandra Ramires) edited by Pedro Serrazina and Catia Peres.

At 17:30 in SC Cinema there is a central screening of the Student Film Competition 2 with a Q&A with the authors: Júlia Lantos (Oliver the Giant), Junho Kim (The Posthuman Hospital), Daniel Sterlin-Altman (Carrotica), Zalika English (Mildred’s Exotic Meat Emporium) and Renato José Duque (Cherry, Passion Fruit). Q&As are hosted by Nino Kovačić.

At 18:00 at Kinoteka, a great block of Grand Competition Short Film 6 contains: Alice Saey’s dancing ecological-dystopian parable Flatastic; Ella Vuorinen’s Flower Show inspired by her own life in the countryside, motherhood and gardening, which in a surprising, detailed and metaphorical way connects floriculture and differentiates generationally not the female gender roles of the 19th century; invasion of Ukraine-inspired Irina Rubina’s pinscreen Contradiction of Emptiness; the award-winning 27 by Flóra Anna Buda about the hopes and fantasies of a girl who lives with her parents for too long; the hilarious, wistful and bizarre puppet metafilm Wander to Wonder by Nina Gantz; and Drizzle in Johnson by Ivan Li – a unique cinematographic experience after which you won’t know which means of transportation has just run over you.

In the MM Centre at 6 p.m. World Panorama 2 arrives with a conversation with Rune Callewaert (Aquarium) and Tess Martin (1976: Search for Life), and the Gallery on the upper floor of KIC is hosting the official opening of the exhibition by Tisja Kljaković Braić Žarko, You Will Spoil the Child! with more than 50 drawings by the renowned author and cartoonist from Split, based on which the film of the same name by the Popović brothers was created for the GC Short Film. After that, a new edition of the workshop Rise&Shine, a programme for the development and presentation of first and second short animated films up to 20 minutes, organised by Animafest Zagreb and the Ljubljana’s Animateka in cooperation with CEE Animation in three modules: script development, project development, project presentation. This year’s edition features 11 projects from the same number of countries, including Croatia (Nikolina Žabčić and Andrijana Vidaček’s Hungry Heart), and the mentors are Oscar winner Michael Dudok de Wit, multiple Goya Award winner Pedro Rivero, and experienced producer, editor, screenwriter and lecturer Anna Vášová.

At 7 p.m. at MSU, we recommend an excellent, slightly nostalgic animated documentary from the Grand Competition Feature Film Pelikan Blue (dir. László Csáki) about Hungarian young men who, after the fall of communism, engage in forging train tickets in order to finally travel the world.

At 8:00 p.m. SC Cinema shows Grand Competition Short Film 3. Babak Beigi (The Route, world premiere), Nienke Deutz (Hotel Miracle), Sunčana Brkulj (Butterfly), Francis Canitot (Peeping Mom) and Nicolas Brault (Entropic Memory, international premiere) talk about their films. The Route from an original perspective shows the life of a truck driver who transports prisoners to be shot, Hotel Miracle starts from the intriguing premise of a middle-aged single woman in a resort suitable for families and pregnant women, Butterfly is a vivid, saturated combination of claymation and 2D and likable character design that shows organic cohesion and parallelism of life, the witty Peeping Mom, a hybrid of stop-animation and 3D created by photogrammetry of dolls, tells about the inappropriate relationship of an old woman to her son who takes care of her, and Entropic Memory is an experimental film created by combining traditional and stop-animation of stereoscopic macro photographs (S3D) that deals with sunken, faded and eroded memories. The Circle, the new film by Animafest winner from 2014, Yumi Joung, the queen of minimalism and psychology, is also being shown.

At 8 p.m. at Kinoteka, the sumptuous French fairy tale from Grand Competition Feature Film Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds takes us into the imagination of a children’s writer whose elaborate worlds (halfway between Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz) are ridden by two girls transformed into cats. The must-see of this year’s Animafest will appeal primarily to families with children (8+), but animation connoisseurs will also find a ‘better past’ in it.

At 20:00 in the MM Centre, the 3rd segment of the theme humour programme presents ‘Theatre of the Absurd’. Here we can see primarily Estonian (Breakfast on the Grass by a group of authors and Life with Herman H. Rott by Chintis Lundgren), Finnish (Swarming by Joni Männistö) and Japanese (Au Fou! by Yoji Kuri, Mt. Head by Koji Yamamura, My Exercise by Atsushi Wada), as well as those who were directly or less directly inspired by Monty Python humour (Signe Baumane’s Five Fucking Fables, Busby Berkeley’s Tribute to Mae West by Paula Bush, Gil Alkabetz’s Rubikon) or belonged to that famous group themselves, like Terry Gilliam (Storytime).

At 9 p.m. at MSU in the Time for the Masters programme, the new medium-length film by the legendary Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, More Vivid than This Morning’s News, should attract many fans who fondly remember My Dog Tulip, Still Life with Animated Dogs or Drawn from Memory. Made in their recognisable style, this new autobiographical and self-referential film about pandemic experiences cannot do without the family dogs, but is primarily dedicated to the challenges of creativity in old age – Paul and Sandra drawing and painting together for up to 15 hours a day.

At 10 p.m. in the SC Cinema, in the same programme, we are watching a new film by another undisputed great, Bill Plympton, who will personally join us in the conversation about Slide – a feature-length story about a mythical cowboy who lives in a corrupt town in the 1940s with the help of a slide guitar and alliance with a giant insect fights against corrupt mayors. At the same time, a Hollywood film is being shot in the city, and there is also a romantic subplot, which all points to Plympton’s characteristic playing with genre matrices that he likes to ironise and destroy. Twice nominated for an Oscar for his short films (Your Face and Guard Dog), Bill Plympton is one of the biggest names in independent animation and probably the first author to draw a feature-length animated film entirely by himself (The Tune). Slide is his ninth such work in total. Dealing with cartoons, comics, satire and music videos in addition to animated film, Plympton has also collaborated with Madonna, Kanye West and Weird Al Yankovic during his career, and also worked on The Simpsons. He received the Winsor McCay Lifetime Achievement Award. Last but not least, Plympton is an old friend of Animafest Zagreb.