Chronicling a Revolution
A bit more on the Zagreb School of Animation.
Welcome! Glad you could join us this Thursday. We’re here with another edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — and this one is about a book.
Last month, we put out a viewing guide to the Zagreb School of Animation. It began in Yugoslavia during the ‘50s, decades before that country split apart — and it changed the medium. This group of artists insisted on breaking rules.
The Zagreb School challenged the themes, visual styles and emotional beats common in animation back then, and it inspired other artists to do the same. Things opened up. Speaking about the new approach, animator Dušan Vukotić of the School said:
… [contemporary animated film] no longer treats of exclusively comic situations and tragedy is no longer foreign to it. It delves into the labyrinths of the human subconscious, keeps company with modern poetry, discloses to us the world of atoms and the cosmos and penetrates into all those areas of our life before which the film camera is helpless. …
Contemporary animated film absorbs all the sources of modern art: painting, sculpture, literature and music, and before it stretch many as yet unexplored paths.1
As mentioned last month, the films of the Zagreb School are popping up in restored quality on an official YouTube channel. Our guide looked at a little of the work on offer. We settled for a brief survey: only so much information fits into an article, and this topic is broad enough to fill a book, or a series of books.
Which brings us to today’s issue.
The book Z Is for Zagreb (1972) is among the best about the Zagreb School. It catalogs the movement’s history, ideas, films and artists, almost like a mini-encyclopedia. We bought a weathered second-hand copy for research in the summer of 2021, and it’s special to us: it was one of the first purchases supported by the newsletter’s income. Even now, we rely on the book.
Z Is for Zagreb is way, way out of print — even its publisher is long gone. Most don’t have access to it. Years ago, we digitized our copy to help a fellow researcher, but it feels like many more people could benefit from it.
So, after some consideration, we’ve decided to preserve it on the Internet Archive for anyone looking to dive into the Zagreb School:
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