A Balkan Tale: How to make animated dystopia?
A presentation by Ana Nedeljković Wednesday, 17 July, Kino Jusuf Gërvalla
Chris Keulemans
All she had to do was look out her window. Halfway through her presentation yesterday, Ana Nedeljković – who created, together with Nikola Majdak, Rabbitland and Untravel – showed us the view from her apartment in Belgrade. Bleak highrises with sad concrete and black windows. Her message: our animations look like dystopia from hell, but they are based on our daily reality.
She went on to thank her native country, Serbia, for all the inspiration it has given her over the years. The irony was tangible, but her pokerface revealed nothing. Serbia offered her everything she needed to create two sophisticated, grim and provocative films, that travel the festivals of the world and gain prizes wherever they go. Hilarious in the most uncomfortable way. They put a smile on your face and your heart in the freezer.
Rabbitland takes place in an urban landscape devastated by war. It could be Hiroshima, Sarajevo, Mosul. But it’s inhabited by rabbits with a hole in their head where the brain should be. Brainless, they have no problem. The only thing they have to do, every day, is to vote – for the same party, the Evil Girls, who grin their scary grin because they win the elections forever. (Again, Ana explains, with that deadpan face, inspiration came from life in Serbia: during the nineties the dictator organized new elections all the time, winning them all in his perfect democracy.)
Untravel is set in a grey city that looks a lot like the view from Ana’s window. Shabby and tired, everything looks battered by desillusionment. A young woman who has lived her whole life in the same room in the same country, has the same dream every night: of traveling to ‘a perfect world called: abroad.’ But no matter how long the journey takes, she always ends up in a place that looks depressingly like home.
Ana was educated as a painter. Then she started exhibiting the brainless rabbits and evil girls in Belgrade galleries. But she had a story to tell and these plasticine figures didn’t move. Until she met Nikola in a bar at 3 am. He is a filmmaker and cameraman. (‘Unfortunately, he couldn’t join me here this time,’ said Ana. ‘He is out shooting politicians somewhere in the Balkans.’) Now, they spend their days in a tiny studio, creating the set design and the characters in full detail. ‘I cross the street from my apartment to the studio every day, to create 4 to 5 seconds of film, while our friends send us kitschy holiday pictures from this perfect world called abroad.’
One of the secrets of animation is that even the most complex ideas must be boiled down to the essence: there is no time to waste. Ana and Nikola use those endless hours in the studio to translate the complex issues of Serbian and global politics and economy into the desolate, single images that have made them into some of the most important animators of today.
