A Balkan Tale: Daniel Šuljić: This is how I do it

Chris Keulemans

 

The Croatian animator and director of Animafest in Zagreb might be the only festival director with an office where films are actually being made: it’s also his studio. Šuljić is the prototype of the animation geek. He lives and breathes animation. Tall, slim, beard, glasses. He speaks like someone who spends all his days and nights drawing, watching, figuring out the right technique for the next crazy idea that he just dreamed up. Yesterday, in the third Balkan Tale, he showed us six of his shorts: 30% of the oeuvre he created over the past twenty years. Bizarre little comedies with a bite. Black and white, 2D, mostly created in his favorite techniques: oil on glass or coffee on glass. Perfect to work with, he explained: easy to apply, easy to wipe. The only disadvantage: it leaves no trace – in the end, he has nothing to show but the storyboard drawings and the film itself. An exhibition about the making of his work, Šuljić said with a wry smile, would be a empty place. 

In his own words, his films are satirical, poetic and melancholic at the same time, often triggered by social criticism. And that is exactly what we saw: a beach scene ends with the sudden glimpse of a gravestone, a little girl magically creates a deep dark hole for the policeman to fall into, a cake party turns into a murderous fight, a young woman sits in a bus and thinks: ‘I’m sitting in this badly drawn bus and think about death.’

Šuljić gave us a few lessons about how to work as an animator. Pointers about different techniques, the value of storyboards, the benefit of collaborating with others (‘you lose 10% of your own ideas, but you win 30% of even better ideas from them’). But the main lesson was that tall, slim, bearded geek himself.