Thursday at Animafest 2026
Musicals and Visual Poetry – Presentations and Panels – Inclusive Dandelion
Odiseja jednog maslačka / Dandelion's Odyssey (Momoko Seto)
The morning break at the SC Cinema, caused by the traditional festival picnic, will be interrupted at 3:30 pm by the Student Film Competition 1, a selection that earlier this week caused strong emotions among many viewers and therefore should be considered obligatory stop for every self-respecting fan of animated film. The third segment of this competition at 5:30 pm is no less impressive, including Meike van Son (The Places We Call Home), Ohad Manor (Fucking War), Elsa Moulin (Acid Echo), Cliona Noonan (There’s Something in the Milk), Yu-jin Zhuang (Falling Mist), Garance Valere (Kamarade) and Melita Sandrin (Arachnophobia). The SC’s shortened Thursday will be crowned, as befits, by the Grand Competition Short Film, whose fourth part at 8 pm screens the films of our Ana Horvat (School Show, the world premiere of the film produced by Umjetnička organizacija Anima), Kirill Khachaturov (Like a Fairy Tale), Luma Flôres (How a River is Born), Leo Černic (Cosmonauts) and Joe Hsieh (Praying Mantis), accompanied, of course, by a Q&A with the aforementioned authors.
The MM Centre also opens its doors in the afternoon – at 3 pm, along with the award ceremony, the candidates for the ASIFA Student Award will be screened here – 11 films of global origin (from India, Iran and China, to Colombia and Bulgaria, Austria and Poland). Weiyu Wang (Forging the Swords), Alan Holly (voideden) and Renato José Duque (Dawn at Terezinha Building) are coming for a chat after World Panorama 3 at 6 pm. A special treat, however, are the animated musicals by Rosto (The Monster of Nix), Daria Kopiec (Your Own Bullshit), Katarína Kerekesová (Stones) and Nika Lindroth von Bahr (The Burden), which are shown from 8 pm as part of the thematic program of Animafest 2026.
At the Museum of Contemporary Art at 6 pm, the retrospective segment Masters of Animation is dedicated to British artist Joanna Quinn – winner of the Animafest 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award. We will see 15 of her films from the period 1987–2025, including the classics Girls’ Night Out, Body Beautiful, Britannia and Affairs of the Art, as well as the more recent film This Land is a Woman dedicated to the women of Gaza. Joanna Quinn’s work is marked by expressive animation, a refined sense of satire and virtuoso drawing style, but also a completely human tendency towards irony, especially in the area of bodily desires and imagination.
The afternoon at KIC is dedicated to the discursive segments of this year’s Animafest, while a cinematic treat for attentive listeners arrives at 8 pm in the form of the excellent Animadox Pelikan Blue (dir. László Csáki), about the endearing plan of young Hungarians who travelled Europe for free by train in the 1990s. Created in collaboration with Dokukino and film curator Dina Pokrajac, the Animadox cycle pays tribute to the imaginary power of animation as a powerful storytelling tool for non-fiction stories. The discursive part of Thursday at KIC includes a presentation of the pan-European initiative Film in Hospital (‘European film as accessibility, distribution and care’, 4 pm), implemented in Croatia by Udruga Djeca susreću umjetnost. Projects from Italy and Belgium will also be presented. At 5 pm, the animation portal ‘Animation HUB’ by CEE Animation will be presented, with special reference to ‘Young Audiences Rating System’ with practical guidelines for authors, distributors, festivals and teachers. Lucia Dubravay Trautenberger and Martina Peštaj are eagerly expecting to share all about it. Finally, at 6 pm, the panel discussion ‘Why Should My Film Be Inclusive?’ will be dedicated to adapting films for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, as well as the blind and visually impaired. The participants will be Maja Ogrizović, the founder of the Film svima and Kultura svima projects, director and animator Jelena Oroz, and Antonio Pavlović from the Audio Description Centre (Centar za audiodeskripcije).
Kinoteka is the only festival cinema location that knows no respite today. Like to a morning bugle call, at 9:30 am young film buffs are lining up again for the children’s competition 2 (7-10 years old), followed by a Q&A with Timon Leder (In a Faraway Forest: Apple of Discord). This will be followed by reruns of ‘Time for the Masters’ (11:30 am) and ‘Focus on Slovenia 1: From Puppet to Puppet’ (2 pm). A particularly attractive screening from the theme section is the one at 4 pm when ‘Visual Music’ is screened. ‘Composed’ by Polish theorist, curator and historian of animation Michał Bobrowski, it includes works by Len Lye, Mary Ellen Bute and Oskar Fischinger, as well as Max Hattler and Tamas Patrovics. The screening at 6 pm is the only opportunity for the general public to see the Grand Competition Short Film 1: the Oscar-winning Canadian puppet film The Girl Who Cried Pearls, the premiering humorous puppet film Please with the voice of Stellan Skarsgård, the impressionistic biography of a Vietnamese shellf gatherer Water Girl crowned with César award, etc. And as if all the above were not enough, at 8 pm Kinoteka triumphs with the feature-length Dandelion Odyssey (dir. Momoko Seto) – an inclusive screening of botanical-cosmic, hyperrealist poetic SF of impressive design and convincing characterisation. The ‘photorealistic’ visuals, but also the soundtrack by Nicolas Becker (from the melancholic percussion of traditional Indonesian band to free jazz and symphonic orchestra) make Odyssey exclusively a cinematic experience, ideal for family viewing. Continuing the trend whose most visible expression is the Oscar-winning Flow, this film uses the journey of unexpected heroes to show the beauty of a world without humans – an ecological parable for which it received the FIPRESCI Award in Cannes. This screening is accompanied by inclusive subtitles and the translation into Croatian sign language, as well as audio description (optional through headset).
We would also like to remind you that from today at 11 am until 7 pm, as part of the 1st Animation x Gamedev Lab Zagreb, every day at the Klet Studio-Gallery (Ilica 73) you can also play the games competing for the new Best Video Game Art Direction Award.
