The 2025 Animafest Zagreb Grand Competition Feature Film equally includes works of outstanding artistic ambition and humanist empathy. Technically, stop-motion animation predominates, but not only are its applications diverse, but the narratives range from the youth film genre, to Gothic adaptation, to expanded painting. The majority of authors find subjects of universal human relevance in their personal histories, and there is also an ‘animalistic’ view of a future devoid of humans.

The Australian claymation film Memoir of a Snail (dir. Adam Elliot), whose stellar cast of voice actors includes Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Nick Cave and Eric Bana, was nominated for an Oscar and won the main prize at the Annecy festival. Made over the course of eight years, the film won over critics and audiences with its advocacy of hope and humanity in the face of the many hardships of life that it directly depicts: poverty, alcoholism, illness, domestic abuse and bullying, religious fundamentalism, paraphilias, pyromania, depression, homophobia, loss of loved ones, and orphanhood. Despite its bleak topics of insecurity, mourning, and trauma, Memoir of a Snail is primarily a sentimental, intelligent, and heart-warming film of a bittersweet tone, with a touch of humour and a celebration of sibling support and connection. In the fine rhythm of this ‘slimy’ biographical retrospective (or a new kind of coming-of-age film), a bit reminiscent of neorealist chronicles and a bit of Tim Burton, redeeming touches of humanity appear, with clear messages such as “life is thought out backwards, but lived forwards,” “one should love one’s own wounds,” and “inner cages are worse than real ones.” It is also a straightforward dedication to eccentricity, non-conformity and daydreaming. Character design authentically borders between the likable and the repulsive, the sweet and the grotesque, and the thoroughly outsider loners and weirdos are depicted in sombre colours on worn out, but very detailed sets. Their dreams (to a large extent motivated by longing for their parents) do not fade in the face of everyday cynicism, and the extraordinarily organic depiction of a slightly twisted expressionist-naturalist world has been compared to works such as Delicatessen. Thanks to the characters’ passion for reading, literary reference hunters will find much to enjoy in Memoir of a Snail, just as fans of animation, to which the story pays an open homage. Characteristically of Adam Elliot, the film partly relies on autobiographical inspirations and the tragicomedy genre, just like his previous works (the Oscar-winning Harvie Krumpet, Uncle, Cousin, Brother, Mary and Max and Ernie Biscuit). Quite naturally for an author of such a reputation, Elliot’s films have been screened at Animafest several times.

The Czech-Slovak-French teen comedy Living Large by Kristina Dufková is the story of a gluttonous and obese, but generally content and witty twelve-year-old whose affections are divided between food and cooking, the school band and a classmate. Under pressure from the school doctor, the PE teacher, bullying and parents (although divorced, both are involved in the boy’s upbringing), but primarily for romantic reasons, he temporarily changes his lifestyle and commits to a diet that spoils his mood. It is a stop-motion puppet and partly 2D adaptation of the young adult novel La vie, en grose by French writer Mikaël Ollivier, which Anna Vášová, a mentor at the Rise&Shine pitching lab, helped to make into a screenplay. The film lightly embraces themes of identity, growing up, falling in love and disappointment, peer bullying, shame and obesity, and friendly and family support, self-acceptance and self-irony triumph. Character design has been compared to that of Claude Barras (My Life as a Courgette), but the models, suitably for adolescence, are characterised by a certain level of disproportionality that addresses the imperative of physical appearance in this period of life. The quality of production is excellent, the materials are haptically suggestive (real human hair is used, after all), the editing is dynamic, and the moments of combining stop and 2D animation (used to depict dreams and imagination) are particularly successful. Given the evident complexity of the cooking scenes and exotic animals, as well as the wide shots whose bird’s-eye POV reveal a lot, it becomes clear why the film was being made for 13 years, primarily in the Czech Republic – a cinema rich in puppetry traditions. Frequent singing and rapping interludes with a mocking content round out this treat of refreshingly unambiguous genre orientation, which received the Jury Prize at Annecy, was nominated for the European Film Award, and also screened at Locarno and Karlovy Vary. In France and the Czech Republic, its distribution was even accompanied by the publication of a cookbook.

Shunsaku Hayashi, a Japanese filmmaker whose work is set at the intersection of painting, animation, and experimental film, has participated in Animafest’s Grand Competition Short Film three times so far (2019, 2020 and 2023, when he received a jury special mention for Our Pain). It is therefore not surprising that he is also expecting the world premiere of his first feature film, Invisions, in Zagreb, which represents both a further elaboration and the current peak of his approach, based on stop-motion of large-format hand-painted canvases (repeatedly filmed and subject to frame-to-frame interventions), photography and video, as well as rotoscoping, drawing and clay. Born in Osaka and trained in London, Hayashi-san was initially a gifted painter who followed in his father’s footsteps and conveyed impressions from his hometown, a diverse and complex confluence of wage workers, homeless people, sex workers and other marginalised groups that left a strong impression on him. The discovery of Jan Švankmajer then led him to the aforementioned intermedia crossroads. He found particular inspiration for Invisions while volunteering in the Fukushima area after the great earthquake of 2011. Passing through empty and abandoned spaces, he felt, he says, the weight of “disappearing histories,” so the visual language of his film is inspired primarily by absence, while the sound is once again the work of his regular collaborator Makoto Itabashi. To some extent following in the footsteps of Our Pain, Hayashi also re-examines fragments of the human body, especially the hands, legs, and ears, which appear unstable in the piece, although they have world-making power – they connect fractured representations in an act of observation and contemporary myth-making. Memories, absent collective and personal reminiscences, are engraved in the bodies where they acquire metamorphic potential. The film begins with a vision of dawn through a wire fence, and the dynamic, chronotopically insatiable change of perspectives that then follows the sunrises of the multiplied Sun across the planet is analogous to changes in colour and animation techniques. In doing so, Hayashi demonstrates a brilliant sense of composition and texture. Taking this, as well as the fact that each chapter concerns a specific symbolic landscape, event or entertaining motif, Invisions is once again philosophical eye candy (“can we rely on sight and touch as markers of reality in a world of ever-new principles?”) that even those who are not usually interested in experimental film should not miss.

The legendary twins Timothy and Stephen Quay, masters of puppet films of a dark and eerie atmosphere whose influence on the recent history of animated (and partly also live action) film cannot be overstated, almost 20 years after their last feature film The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes present their third feature film, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, a free stop-motion animated, but also black-white-brown feature film adaptation of their favourite Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz. Set in 1937 and the sanatorium Karpaty (Schulz’s story is set in Drohobycz, Galicia, now Ukraine, the writer’s hometown in whose Jewish ghetto he was murdered during the Holocaust), the seven-part film follows the hero’s visit to his dying father in an institution where time flows at a distance (interval) from the real world, and its spatial coordinates are not the most stable either. The story is observed in a kind of kaleidoscope, through the eyepiece of a desk cabinet in which a disembodied multidimensional retina rests. In this world, “everything is a matter of perspective”, including the boundaries of life and death. In the “vestibules of the afterlife” lives a doctor with multiple pairs of hands, and along with an ornithological menagerie, we will also meet the Satan himself. It is largely a story of Gothic assumptions (e.g. the ‘haunted castle’ motif) that can be reminiscent of E. A. Poe, but also of Kafka. More specifically, although they are Americans with British degrees and addresses and admirers such as Christopher Nolan, Terry Gilliam and Wes Anderson, the Quay brothers are deeply rooted, first and foremost, in the heritage of Central European art. Already with the anthological Street of Crocodiles (also based on Bruno Schulz), with which they visited Zagreb in 1986, they deserved to be mentioned in the same sentence as the greats of stop-motion animation Władysław Starewicz and Jan Švankmajer, although they were most influenced by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica. Continuing their favourite space at the crossroads of life and death, sleep and waking life, that is, in the literary rich field of half-life, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass is a physical and psychological cyclical labyrinth of memories, nightmares and visions in which characters multiply, change appearance, die and come to life. The prevailing feelings of mourning, fear and claustrophobia are in line with the understanding of Schulz’s work as a poeticization of everyday life in the direction of a disturbing otherness, in which the brothers see its affinity with the animation medium. Parts of children’s dolls, various organic and inorganic materials, a dusty, smoky and blurred atmosphere and carefully designed lighting achieve dark dreamlike effects and a displaced fantasy world. The slender and fragile dolls are, as the authors say, emissaries of the otherworld, proud of their eerie otherness and the fact that naturalistic rules do not apply to them. Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass is also an obvious tribute to the past of cinema and the prerequisites of cinematic illusion itself, with a multitude of optical motifs and an emphasis on the ‘drama of vision’. Regular collaboration with Polish composer Leszek Jankowski is replaced in Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass by one with Timothy Nelson, who with his ‘disturbing lullabies’ significantly contributes to the atmosphere of the film of reserved narrative. After its premiere at the Venice Festival, we too can hardly wait to step into the Quay brothers’ dollhouse once again.

Based on a true story, Giovanni Columbu’s Italian-German film Balentes is a work of regional and dialectal vocation – a Sardinian story about two boys who, in 1940, free horses from a military farm out of idealistic, pacifist, but above all empathetic motives. The film’s title is therefore a Sardinian word for a daring but reckless yearning for adventure. But these noble horse thieves perform their rebellious, romantic and symbolic act of resistance and freedom in the atmosphere of fascist militarisation, as a result of which they are betrayed and ambushed. The plot, which is presented nonlinearly, fragmentarily and allusively (but with the use of intertitles, which, in addition to being a nod to silent film, also functions as a connective tissue), also captures the effects of the central event on friends and family members, local police and politicians, and the entire community. In this regard, Balentes also reflects its broader history, so the definition of the genre remains suspended between historical melancholic-fatalistic (melo)drama, western, folk ballad, avant-garde film and homage. As Roberto Oggiano writes, the topics of the desire for escape and anti-militarism have long and strongly been present in Sardinian cinema and literature (Salvatore Satta, Grazia Deledda, Marcello Fois, Michela Murgia), but Columbu wants to liberate his story, which originates from his family tradition (he was born in Nuoro, and he heard about the boy’s fate from his grandmother), from ‘the cultural cage of regionalism’ and give it a universal meaning. Balentes is therefore, by combining traditional and newer techniques, also visibly attuned to the manoeuvring between the past and the present. As Stephen Dalton says, the mostly monochromatic expression refers to the early experimental film of the silent era (and even to the protofilms of Eadweard Muybridge), but also to futurism, and the drawn and coloured backgrounds are accompanied by rotoscoped characters who appear as ‘transparent phantoms’, shadowy silhouettes that emerge from the backgrounds and disappear into them. This way, darkness becomes an active character in the film – a canvas from which fragmentary memories emerge. In almost 30,000 landscapes, Sardinia is presented in a minimalist manner, with economical yet gestural brushstrokes, scratches and stains, and loops and glitches (in order to evoke the decay of the celluloid film). Given the motif of riders aligned with the horizon line, strong associations with avant-garde works such as Malevich’s Red Cavalry and the American western ‘big sky’ come into play, as well as the use of archive newsreel material and attraction films (e.g. the Lumière brothers) as models for individual scenes. Balentes’s orchestral and choral music, which was also screened at the Rotterdam and Annecy festivals, also evokes the period of early film, while rich noises narratively complement the reduced visual expression.

Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis, director of the Oscar-winning Flow, was introduced to Croatian audiences back in 2015 when he presented Priorities at Animafest in the Student Film Competition, setting the course for the development of a truly special computer-generated 3D aesthetic. Zilbalodis’s feature film Away (2019) was also screened in Zagreb, where, with its ‘video game appearance’, much was said about the fact that he made it entirely himself, which, even in the era of computer dominance in the production of feature-length animation, continued to be considered a somewhat crazy undertaking. Although Flow is no longer a completely independent piece, the director is still the director of photography, editor, composer, animator, character and background designer, as well as co-screenwriter and co-producer. Flow is characterised by an inspired world-building of open symbolism and innovative form that successfully shapes a wandering eye for multidirectional movement towards ever more distant horizons. It is a world marked by sunlit greenery and stormy greyness of nature, as much as by a monolithic architectural tapestry embroidered with different historical and geographical styles. Also, Flow is one of those stories that transforms human civilisation into an echo, a memory, and a monument, and takes us on an archaeological journey through its ruins. This not-so-rare SF trope here functions as a very clear cautionary tale in an adventurous guise – a climatological parable that promotes cooperation among ‘animal species,’ but it is also the place of formation of a special sentiment that permeates us when we suddenly see a human as a passing point in time and the cosmos. Convincing animal characterology and unquestionable charm driven by the computer realism of design and fluid motions also allows for occasional slapstick breaks, and Flow is stylistically defined primarily by the freely roaming accompanying camera, unusually lively and mobile when changing shots and angles and panning through the diegetic space. While some will find its three-dimensional uninhibitedness truly reminiscent of artistically ambitious video games, others may think of earlier cinematic voyages through metropolises and space stations. Aspects of video game aesthetics also include distinct lighting and graphic effects such as the insistence on backlighting and accompanying lens flare and anti-aliasing, or the noticeable appearance of polygons and the blur effect in dynamic scenes. The off-scene music that ‘drives’ the heroes forward and conventionally increases/decreases depending on the level of suspense is combined with luxurious ambient noises and animal vocalisations into a rich soundscape that compensates for the absence of speech. This apparent lack also highlights the acute theme of communication of the colourful menagerie torn between survival instincts, selfishness, solidarization, and affection. The viewer’s understanding of animal actions and messages, following skilful direction, is intuitive, making Flow a completely acceptable family film.