Six Croatian films have deserved to be presented on Animafest’s biggest stage, in Grand Competition Short Film, where they compete with works from all over the world for the Grand Prix and the corresponding Oscar qualification, the Golden Zagreb Award, the Zlatko Grgić Award and the Mr. M Award. These are: No Room by Jelena Oroz (produced by Bonobostudio), Fačuk by Maida Srabović (Croatian producer Tetrabot, and Slovenian co-producers Urgh!, Octopics and RTV Slovenia), Moral Support by Vuk Jevremović (his own, German-Croatian production Canvas), The Shadow by Petra Balekić (Jaka produkcija), How by Marko Meštrović (Kreativni sindikat) and A Pain in the Butt by Elena Walf (Croatian co-producer Minya – Film & Animation, German producer Studio Film Bilder).

Croatian films also appear in the international Student Film Competition, competing for the Dušan Vukotić Award. After the visually and thematically different Bird House and Chicks, with the new film From Peter to Aida Petra Pavetić Kranjčec (produced by ALU – Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb) continues to demonstrate stylistic and narrative expanse – this time it is a nostalgic melodrama about summer love from the 1960s that refuses to accept the distance between Germany and Yugoslavia, but continues to strengthen itself first in epistolary and verse form, and then in reality. With the musical accompaniment of the Avsenik Brothers Ensemble and in sepia tones, From Peter to Aida takes us into the romantic past. The Serbian-Croatian-German co-production Floating by Jelena Milunović (Croatian co-producer is Adriatic Animation, and the film was created at the famous Babelsberg Konrad Wolf Film University, which won this year’s Best Animation School Award) is mostly black and white, ochre and blue, and a very personal representation of a father’s mental illness, achieved through imaginative visualisations, fine scene transitions and the daughter’s perspective through frequent framing from behind the back of the head and over the shoulder. And while in The Shadow from Grand Competition Petra Balekić creates the animated act in black and white, Marta Margetić in her student film Spine (ALU production) in the genre of artistic autobiography presents it in colour, with a touch of caricature and expanded ‘bony’ imaginations. Suitable to the theme, animation is also somewhat stiff and jumpy, and the soundscape is unpleasantly ‘rolling’, as if it rested on creaking ball bearings. Andrea Miletić’s Beast (ALU) also has a fine graphic, partly comic-book black-and-white aesthetic, as a film about family relationships, but also about repressed emotions embodied in a demonic child who must be hidden from a toxic mother. With a good sense of gags, Beast both entertains and advocates emancipation from parental dictates.

In the Films for Children and Youth Competition, where the awards are given by a children’s jury, along with A Pain in the Butt, the film Sailboat at the End of the Street (Zagreb film) by Venezuelan Zagreb-based animator Lucía Aimara Borjas, with a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts, will be presented, a film adaptation of a picture book by Tamara Bakran and Vendi Vernić, which addresses the difficult topic of bullying by mixing fantasy and reality in a story about a girl given a tiger by Marco Polo.

In the traditional Croatian Film Competition, which showcases new Croatian films to the eyes of the world, 13 more titles are presented, in addition to the previously mentioned, providing an overview of our animation production. Its close followers will be particularly pleased with the film Psychonauts (Croatian Association of Digital Artists, Zagreb film), as it is a new stop-motion animation project by Niko Radas and patients of the Vrapče Psychiatric Clinic – the authors of the inspired The Unusual Bath of Mister Otmar (2019), winner of the Oktavijan Award and a number of international awards. In Psychonauts, also a puppet film which was also selected for the Annecy festival programme, mental disorders are depicted embodied, as spatial ‘extensions’ of their carriers, anthropomorphised objects or symbolic items. The soundtrack (primarily the use of a synthetic voice whose declamation of diagnosis and therapy takes the form of a slightly eerie melody) is again exceptionally functional and contributes to the dystopian atmosphere as much as the wooden, harboury and noir-like, ‘pharmacotherapeutic’ cosmic sets, marked by a distinctly cinematic camera.

Renowned stop animation masters Thomas and Ivana Volda continue their collaboration with the American TED-Ed and producer Gerta Xhelo on vivid educational projects in the field of geobiology and ecology with the work Scientists Are Obsessed with This Lake. Again, it is a demanding combination of collage, painting on glass and other techniques, and the topic is anaerobic bacteria from the early days of the Earth (before the so-called great oxidation event) that have re-evolved in the Swiss Alps, in the meromictic lake Cadagno. This exceptional combination of a commissioned film and artistic animation with a dominant profile-flat perspective ensures a maximally comprehensible presentation of a complex topic. In the same production, Ivana Volda independently made How Are These Fires Burning Underground?, technically a no less complex and equally evident film about the so-called ‘zombie fires’ that strongly contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, which are made more frequent by climate change and the drying up of peatlands.

The puppet sci-fi satire The Black Smoke of Prediction, by Damir Šuša (Zagreb film), about a Croatian space expedition, may remind some of Douglas Adams, but it will primarily attract fans of mocking depictions of our current political and economic circumstances, regional stereotypes, mentalities and genre references. The stop-motion ‘block’ concludes with Adaptation 2.0 by Darko Bakliža, a master of the visual and animated nude who, under the auspices of Zagreb film, continues to reflect on the human body and its perception with regard to nudity/clothing in the context of social status and ‘cultural malaise’, this time resorting to pixilation, 2D and 3D animation, as well as artificial intelligence. By stripping and dressing painterly and photographic representations of famous historical figures, as well as models from famous canvases, Bakliža does not shy away from the primordial motifs of lust and shame, and interprets the chronology of clothing styles as a reflection of their changing status in light of the oscillations of social morality. The royalist (and more broadly political) pomp in this nudist-ludic causerie is more often under attack precisely because of its stronger attachment to external manifestations of virility, femininity, conspicuous consumption and power.

Piova by Danilo Dučak (independent production) places a water-imbued story about female longing, desire, love and painful changes in a coastal setting, based on an Istrian folk tale and an autochthonous Vodnjan song of the same name. Illustrated partly with symbolic and partly realistic drawings on notebook paper and computer 2D animation, Piova is accompanied by a performance by Livio Morosin and Anica Franjul. The author of the film, Danilo Dučak, is an established art photographer, illustrator, painter and animator, a famous photo editor of Polet, who settled in Motovun after a long American career. Nikola Pavošević’s The Magical Girl (ALU) is, however, a rare example of domestic genre animation that finds in a feminist superhero film, the kinetics of Japanese inspirations, a neon purple metropolis with ominous red notes and floral symbolism a message about the burden of popularity and double identity, but possibly also an allegory about unquestionable female surrender to the exploitation of the community.

With a dynamic change of perspectives and the relevant theme of last year’s Beast, Ivana Šoljić introduced herself to fans of animated film, to whom she is presenting her new work, Don’t Be Late (ALU), at Animafest 2025 – a 2D gag film about the anticipation of a romantic encounter that slowly turns into a disaster for an anthropomorphic deer of bright colours. A spiritual sequel to last year’s psychoanalytic comedy Fish I, Ada-Nela Peharda’s (ALU) new film Of Mice and Books is a film based on a revisited story and verbal humour that brings together two rodents with different views on literature (as food for the body or the mind), indirectly touching on the debate about ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ literature, ‘consumption’ and the conscious experience of culture. Rhythmic animated nudes and male-female relationships are the starting point of Adhesion by ALU student Rafael Cuculić, in whose drawn black-and-white vision bodies meet, attract, merge and create new life, while for the film Life of a Theatre, ALU student Nika Ševerdija combined ballet, drama and opera to depict all the elements of the preparation for a performance in the bustling backstage of the national theatre.

The video for Sundog Sunburn by Vedran Komlen (produced by Valhala) for the single of the same name by the Bjelovar progressive rock band Them Moose Rush is a post-apocalyptic-desert tale about a personified rover and its animal passengers on the edge of a canyon, made in a combination of digital impressionism and surrealism. Finally, the exceptional film for children Baking with Boris is a French-Swiss-Croatian co-production (Folimage, Nadasdy Film, Adriatic Animation) by Maša Avramović, who after graduating from the Belgrade Faculty of Applied Arts also studied at the famous La Poudrière. The heart-warming story of a baker troubled by an allergy to flour and the imperative of a family career, and who is helped by his children and the strong community of the town in which he lives, relies on gags, a striking mix of emotions and an appealingly simple, but highly produced drawing of creatively unrealistic proportions and perspectives. The film is part of the special segment Boris the Baker and Friends, suitable for ages 3+, which will be screened in Zagreb’s cultural centres and in the Museum of Contemporary Art.

As every year, Animafest’s retrospectives also include many treasures of domestic animation. In the theme section of Animafest 2025 The World on the Edge, in the segment dedicated to war, we can see Joško Marušić’s legendary anti-war miniature I Love You Too (1991), while Borivoj Dovniković’s Learning to Walk (1978) will be screened as part of a programme dedicated to 65 years of ASIFA, the International Animated Film Association. The Masters of Animation section brings an author’s retrospective of Veljko Popović, featuring a total of nine works from the period between 2008 and 2024. The work of Veljko Popović is the point at which Croatian computer 2D and 3D animation definitely and steadily steps from the pioneering period into that of full artistic creativity and affirmation, which is why The One Who Measures, Cyclists or Planemo are rightly considered modern classics. An overview of the 50 years of history of the School of Animated Film (ŠAF) Čakovec contains, in turn, 17 films from the period 1981-2025.

Last year’s Windows from the South by Eugen Bilankov is screened in the section of films nominated for the ASIFA Student Award. The second edition of the That’s What She Said programme, dedicated to contemporary women directors and created under the auspices of the AFN (Central and Eastern European Festival Network), includes Butterfly by Sunčana Brkulj and Three Birds by Zarja Menart (Croatian co-production).