Way to Your Neighbour – Accompanied by Masters – The New Youth of Children’s Film

Animafest Zagreb 2026 Croatian Film Competition

The Book of Dreaming (Irena Jukić Pranjić)

In addition to Ana Horvat's School Show (Umjetnička organizacija Anima) and Krešimir Pernek's Strive (Zagreb Film), which are also screened in the Grand Competition Short Film, 17 new works are included in Animafest's Croatian Film Competition 2026 – the strongest gathering of Croatian animation cinema which is presented to the world on the last, most ceremonious day of the festival. And that this revue goes far beyond the national borders is evidenced by the fact that the winner also qualifies for an Oscar nomination. This year's Croatian animated film output is marked by collaborations with production companies from neighbouring Slovenia, new films by esteemed masters of animation and an exciting surge of films for children.

The Girl Who Wasn't Afraid of Bears (Jaka Produkcija, in co-production with Slovenian and Hungarian companies Octopics, Invida, RTV Slovenia and CUB Animation) is an ambitious new film by the prolific animator and illustrator Lea Vučko (Vsemir, The Legend of Goldhorn). The recipient of the audience award from the Ljubljana Animateka, this adaptation of a comic book presents itself as a ‘Balkan’ folk tale, but with a Western hue and an emphasised seven-act structure based on the conventions of silent film (such as the use of intertitles). With lavish music and shadows, ‘grainy’ appearance and Tarantino-esque referentiality, the piece is unusually playful in terms of mise-en-scène and framing for an animated film, while also carrying a strong subversive potential. It is based on the premise of a girl who, having unknowingly killed her father, rejects his concept of a ‘world too dangerous for a girl’, as well as patriarchal gender roles, which she also ‘discards’ on the archetypal hero's journey. If we add that The Girl Who Wasn't Afraid of Bears is also a capable comedy accomplished by toying with the aforementioned narrative codes, the slightly caricatured ‘comic book’ character designs, fantastic folklore elements, and contemporary identity dilemmas, it is clear that it should be addressed as a Film with a capital F.

Luka Vucić's Heartwreck (produced by Kinoteka) is also lively framed and soundtracked as to resemble a live action direction, but embodied and humorously illustrated with a metaphor only animation is capable of – a fable about the conflict between the heart and its owner. From the crazy chase that seems "as though it came out of a cartoon", through the equilibrium between appropriation and ironic departure from sentimentalism, all the way to the symbolic pregnancy that emphasises emotional cracks, and the morals of self-acceptance and coping with loss, Heartwreck is a completely unusual ‘romantic comedy’.

The renowned comic book author, animator, painter and illustrator with an international career, Danijel Žeželj, returns to the Animafest competition after almost a decade with his new film Vanja & Vanja (Zagreb film). Against the spectacularly detailed black and white backdrops of a war-torn city, Žeželj tells a rotoscoped and 2D story about the friendship of young heroes who float through the destroyed urban landscape, communicate in sign language and adapt to brutal reality by playing deadly hockey and deceiving paramilitaries. The great master of darkness, shadow and contrast (also reflected in the warmth of the relationship set against the apocalyptic environment) should definitely be seen on the big screen, for which Animafest 2026 is the first in the world to offer a unique opportunity.

Irena Jukić Pranjić, a prominent animator (Gamer Girl, Lust, Real Boy) and comic book author, also returns to this competition with The Book of Dreaming (Umjetnička organizacija Anima). It is a narratively autobiographical, stylistically self-referential reflection on various ‘aggregate states of thought’ such as dreams, memories and fantasies, and the role of art (primarily comics and film) in their conservation. With the voice of Lana Barić recalling the childhood and reminiscing on ‘the last things’, we follow the oneiric, associative and poetic logic of figural, mostly monochromatic transformations of pronounced geometry and undulation, in which some Op-Art and possibly Bourek-inspired traces can be glimpsed. Branko Farac is another returnee to this competition with Pictoman (Zagreb film) – visually based more on his previous, black and white, personal-philosophical Psychographic than on the even earlier, Moebius-esque Technement. From Hegel's motto, the yin-yang duality and the traffic accident, Pictoman embarks on symbolically laden, iconic transformations, but also reaches more specific humour with the theme of male-female relations and self-examination of the pianist-protagonist. The demiurge power of the film, apart from the once again underlined comic book sensibility of rich shading, thought bubbles and pictograms, thus also stems from the art of music.

Four produced by Kreativni sindikat, is so far the most mature work of Dea Jagić, artist dedicated to surrealist and allegorical registers of (mostly) stop-motion. With a complex combination of pixilation, animation of objects and 2D (for which she to some extent ‘prepared’ with the previous Shadows), Jagić made Four as a diptych between waking and dreaming (or trance), surface and underground – transforming her usual fascination with organic growth and synergy into a broader concept of the ‘penetration’ of two-dimensional cartoon characters into the three-dimensional space of strange anthropomorphic animals (and vice versa). Besides, Four is also a subtly engaged, ecological post-apocalypse about a world without water. In addition to cutout and 2D animation, winner of the ASIFA student award for her previous film Love is a Color Nikolina Žabčić uses the technique of kinetic typography (‘moving text’, as a symbolic representation of the inability to communicate inner pain) in her new work Hungry Heart (Zagreb film), all to illustrate a struggle with an eating disorder. The blue silhouette of the heroine lost in her own reflections (‘self-images’), penetrated by the ‘liquid’ environment, and bent in agony, are functional acts of mediating her distress, as well as her final self-acceptance. The customary wink towards the classics of the Zagreb School is contained in the flat, avant-garde approach to the body line.

Set against impressive backgrounds inspired by Eyvind Earle (American illustrator known for his collaborations with Disney), By a Thread (dir. David Kmet, University of Arts in London) unravels a poetic metaphor of the string of memory going back to erstwhile gay love. The gentle, reminiscent and almost dance-like melodrama also testifies to the plurality of genres screened at this year's Croatian Film Competition. After last year's The Magical Girl, a rare example of Croatian superhero animation, Nikola Pavošević's Language of the Sea (Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb) remains in a similar neon-pastel palette and female focalization, but with a more painterly, watercolour manner belonging to the coastal setting in which a girl ostensibly searches for her brother, but in fact for ‘what lies beneath’ the sea of knowledge. Although the narrative lines are clear, the work also imposes itself as an allegory about the search for identity, or rather the courage needed to find it. Dora Kvež’s Bangs (VERN University) is a cute miniature about the troubles with a pimple, raised to a higher level by a creative surrealist treatment of the protagonist's inner state and her attempts to solve the problem. Slightly leaning on Japanese influences in character design, and dominantly pastel in the set design, Bangs is also a reflection on self-acceptance.

The Surprising Way We Can Cool the Planet by Ivana Volda for TED-Ed is a continuation of a successful documentary series of colourful and engaging educational projects in the fields of geology, geobiology and ecology, i.e. climate change. It is once again a demanding combination of cutout, painting on glass and other techniques, with the fresh theme of weathering of rocks and a global project to accelerate this process, which could reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In the brown-purple factory setting of Colon Parenthesis (dir. Marija Ana Turčić, Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb), a robot tries to fix a malfunction in a complex system, but the specific appearance is a more pronounced aspect of this film than its plot: both minimalist and saturated, iconic and with simple lines, the image uses suggestions of glitches and surveillance footage, as well as symbolic representations of the film space in a possible allusion to a nuclear accident. Evolution of a Heroic Act (Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb) by Tara Klepac is, on the other hand, an ‘atomic’ burlesque about a worm, a cat and a bird who narrowly avoid disaster through a series of incredible events. A tense and entertaining, directed with a good sense of rhythm, this light-hearted miniature "cartoon" is for all generations. Arachnophobia, a Slovenian claymation (Academy of Arts, University of Nova Gorica) by Croatian author Melita Sandrin, is a humorous cringe grotesque whose strongest point is the impressive visualization of the fear it revolves around, which, among other things, also uses the strata-cut technique.

In a Faraway Forest: Apple of Discord by Slovenian author Timon Leder (Croatian co-producer is Jaka Produkcija) is a new children's film by the established author of the genre (Weasel, Mouse House) about a hedgehog, a squirrel and the title fruit that causes them to quarrel, as well as the rest of the forest crowd that tries to profit from their dispute. This is a dynamic, beautifully drawn and fluidly animated, well-dubbed, and particularly humorous adaptation of a picture book that will entertain even adult viewers and show them the already proverbially high quality of children's animation in our neighbourhood. The Last Straw (also Jaka Produkcija) is a somewhat rare example of ‘four-handed directing’ in our animation after the time of the Zagreb School. In this ecological parable suitable for younger age groups, Dorotea Radušić and Mislav Rotim follow likably designed sea animals faced with plastic waste. Attractive in appearance and equipped with a narrator's voice and pleasant music, The Last Straw conveys knowledge to children about its characters, pollution processes and the benefits of recycling like a modernised version of an educational film. A children's film from the same series as the previous Elena Walf's A Pain in the Butt, The Motherless Egg is endearing and gentle, technically flawless, by ‘cross-eyed’ character design and classical music distinguished 2D story about discarded egg whose welfare is taken care of by the same cute dog that won us over at Animafest 2025.