Visitors gathered in the entrance hall as the festival began. Photo courtesy of the Zagreb World Festival of Animated Films.

In the 1980s, Zagreb was the definite meeting place for the animation world, alternating every second year with Annecy. The 1992 festival was held while the war was still looming. Since then, every festival has been bigger and better than the last, and with this 13th World Festival of Animated Films, the Zagreb festival is back where it belongs.

The Films of Course
As usual the film selection in Zagreb reflected the entire range of world animation with a main focus on artistic film. Films from more than 30 countries were screened in the three main programs of the festival: the official competition, the student competition and "Animania," five panorama programs partially chosen by the selection committee, with one program being chosen by the festival. The selection in Zagreb has a tradition for being more open toward experimental films than Annecy, and this year's festival was no exception. Detelina Grigorova-Kreck (Bulgaria/Germany), John R. Dilworth (U.S.) and Vedran Mihletic (Croatia) chose both a demanding, inspiring and entertaining program.

The festival directors Margit Antauer and Josko Marusic and their crew. Photo courtesy of the Zagreb World Festival of Animated Films.

The weakest part of the selection was the advertising films. The winning film Special Selections: Campbell's Soup by Aleksandra Korejwo (U.S., Poland) is an excellent commercial, but my impression of the commercials in competition was that many of the best animated commercials from the last two years had not been entered. The commercials felt a bit misplaced because they were run in the middle of the competition programs. I also find the competition programs in Zagreb a bit too long, even though the festival wisely has an intermission in the middle. Maybe the problem is that they start a bit late, at 9 p.m., and therefore, do not finish before 11:30 p.m.

A great many of the directors in competition were present in Zagreb and I was greatly impressed by the list of guests; 130 international professionals from nearly 30 countries made this year's festival a real international event. Major animation names like Andrej Krjanovsky (Russia), Giannalberto Bendazzi (Italy), Joan Gratz (USA) and Noureddin Zarrinkelk (Iran) illustrate this international scene. This year's jury was Natalia Chernyshova (Ukraine), Sayoko Kinoshita (Japan), Peter Dougherty (U.K.), Raoul Servais (Belgium) and Milan Blazekovic (Croatia).