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World Festival of Animated Film /
short and feature edition 4 to 9 June 2018
World Festival of Animated Film / short and feature edition 4 to 9 June 2018
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What do game development, Zrinjevac and Alice have in common? Animafest!
06/13/2015

A magnificent open air screening at Zrinjevac had a rerun this Friday: citizens of Zagreb and their guests again took out countless blankets on the grass of Zagreb’s central park and enjoyed a film screenings under the blue sky. This time the film was the animated fairy tale with exceptional visualisation, Azur and Asmar, by the French master of animation and winner of Animafest’s Lifetime Achievement Award Michel Ocelot. This Persian fairy tale set in the 15th century was shown at Animafest thanks to a collaboration with Rendez-vous, the festival of France in Croatia. The screening followed after a reading of Alice in Wonderland picture book, published by Planetopija and illustrated by famous Croatian illustrator Zdenko Bašić.

It was just one of the countless activities of the fourth day at the 25th Animafest Zagreb. The other part of side events was all about video games. During the day there was a wrap-up of the workshop that took place since Monday at FER. At Tuškanac, Croatian game developers held a well-frequented lecture about the experiences in the sector. Ante Vrdelja (CGDA) said that, regardless of the fact that local game design industry exports 99 per cent of their product, there is a lack of understanding and support on the part of government institutions. Lovro Nola (Machina game design school) spoke about self-employment possibilities in game development industry and desirable skills developers and animators should possess, drawing from his own experiences. Davor Hunski of the most successful Croatian developer team Croteam gave a historical overview of the Croatian game development scene, presented Croteam’s work and pointed out that a university animation course is a good starting point for working in the industry. All the speakers expressed their belief that the collaboration of Croatian game development sector and Animafest would grow even more intense in the years to come, given the straightforward connection between game development and animation.

During the day, the festival guests were taken by the organisers to a traditional picnic, this time Camp Zagreb in Rakitje. Some of them used this time in the nature to recharge for their Q&A sessions that followed later in the day. On Friday, after Short Film Grand Competition, the guests were Marko Meštrović (Levitation), Shunsuke Saito (Small Gardne), Maryam Kashkoolinia (That’s Mine!), Eve Deroeck and Mélanie Tourneur (Looper) and Evert de Beijer (Lucy).

The evening closed with a concert by the theatrical band Chishche Lishche at the festival club Vinyl.