Dissertation Full Draft June 12, 2018
The Zagreb School of Animation and the Unperfect Paul W. Morton A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2018 Reading Committee Gordana Crnković, Chair José Alaniz Jennifer Bean Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media 1 ©Copyright 2018 Paul W. Morton 2 University of Washington Abstract The Zagreb School of Animation and the Unperfect Paul W. Morton Chair of Supervisory Committee Gordana Crnković Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media From 1956 until 1991, a group of animators based at the Zagreb Film studio, in the Croatian capital, produced approximately 500 shorts, including avant-garde experiments, children’s cartoons, gag shorts, and sex comedies. Like Yugoslavia itself, the Zagreb School of Animation (as the animators collectively came to be called) challenged utopian ideologies and the East-West binaries of the Cold War. Their work transformed the cartoon from a cinema of attractions, which celebrated the technology which gave it birth, into a cinema of the laborer, which celebrated the humble artisan behind the technology. Animation, historically, has been described as a seamless marriage between mankind’s lost childhood, embodied by anthropomorphized animals, and techno-modernity. The Zagreb School, however, emphasized human fallibility and accepted technical mistakes, such as a stray line in a frame, or an imperfectly synchronized connection between sound and movement. Rather than the confident Soviet new man, the defining character type of the Zagreb School was the “small man.” This dissertation uses the “small man” to understand how the Zagreb School 3 struggled with the major preoccupations of post-World War II Yugoslavia: fears of nuclear annihilation, environmental collapse, and the disorientations of urbanization.
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